# SARC: Sentiment-Augmented Deep Role Clustering for Fake News Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.04692 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.04692/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 65 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [UMAP: Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection for Dimension Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03426/) (2018)
- [Empirical Evaluation of Gated Recurrent Neural Networks on Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.3555/) (2014)
- [SCAN: Learning to Classify Images without Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12320/) (2020)
- [A Stylometric Inquiry into Hyperpartisan and Fake News](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05638/) (2017)
- [Bad Actor, Good Advisor: Exploring the Role of Large Language Models in Fake News Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.12247/) (2023)
- [Fake News in Sheep's Clothing: Robust Fake News Detection Against LLM-Empowered Style Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10830/) (2023)
- [Analogical Reasoning on Chinese Morphological and Semantic Relations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.06504/) (2018)
- [Explainable Fake News Detection With Large Language Model via Defense Among Competing Wisdom](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.03371/) (2024)
- [N2D: (Not Too) Deep Clustering via Clustering the Local Manifold of an Autoencoded Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05968/) (2019)
- [The Truth Becomes Clearer Through Debate! Multi-Agent Systems with Large Language Models Unmask Fake News](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.08532/) (2025)
- [LLM-Generated Fake News Induces Truth Decay in News Ecosystem: A Case Study on Neural News Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.20013/) (2025)
- [Let Silence Speak: Enhancing Fake News Detection with Generated Comments from Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16631/) (2024)
- [GAMED: Knowledge Adaptive Multi-Experts Decoupling for Multimodal Fake News Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.12164/) (2024)
- [End-to-end Learnable Clustering for Intent Learning in Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.05975/) (2024)
- [Is LLMs Hallucination Usable? LLM-based Negative Reasoning for Fake News Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09153/) (2025)
- [Propagation Tree Is Not Deep: Adaptive Graph Contrastive Learning Approach for Rumor Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.07201/) (2025)
- [LLM-Enhanced Multiple Instance Learning for Joint Rumor and Stance Detection with Social Context Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.08888/) (2025)
- [Harnessing Network Effect for Fake News Mitigation: Selecting Debunkers via Self-Imitation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03357/) (2024)
- [A Macro- and Micro-Hierarchical Transfer Learning Framework for Cross-Domain Fake News Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14403/) (2025)
- [Seeing Through AI's Lens: Enhancing Human Skepticism Towards LLM-Generated Fake News](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14012/) (2024)
- [Fractional Budget Allocation for Influence Maximization under General Marketing Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05669/) (2024)
- [Collaboration and Controversy Among Experts: Rumor Early Detection by Tuning a Comment Generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04076/) (2025)
- [Revisiting Fake News Detection: Towards Temporality-aware Evaluation by Leveraging Engagement Earliness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.12775/) (2024)
- [Exploring agent interaction patterns in the comment sections of fake and real news](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05083/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Fake news detection has been a long-standing research focus in social networks. Recent studies suggest that incorporating sentiment information from both news content and user comments can enhance detection performance. However, existing approaches typically treat sentiment features as auxiliary signals, overlooking role differentiation, that is, the same sentiment polarity may originate from users with distinct roles, thereby limiting their ability to capture nuanced patterns for effective detection. To address this issue, we propose SARC, a Sentiment-Augmented Role Clustering framework which utilizes sentiment-enhanced deep clustering to identify user roles for improved fake news detection. The framework first generates user features through joint comment text representation (with BiGRU and Attention mechanism) and sentiment encoding. It then constructs a differentiable deep clustering module to automatically categorize user roles. Finally, unlike existing approaches which take fake news label as the unique supervision signal, we propose a joint optimization objective integrating role clustering and fake news detection to further improve the model performance. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets, RumourEval-19 and Weibo-comp, demonstrate that SARC achieves superior performance across all metrics compared to baseline models. The code is available at: https://github.com/jxshang/SARC.