# NewsRECON: News Article Retrieval for Image Contextualization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.14121 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.14121/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
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- [Molmo2: Open Weights and Data for Vision-Language Models with Video Understanding and Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.10611/) (2026)
- [Open-Domain, Content-based, Multi-modal Fact-checking of Out-of-Context Images via Online Resources](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00061/) (2021)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Conflicting Evidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13079/) (2025)
- [AMMeBa: A Large-Scale Survey and Dataset of Media-Based Misinformation In-The-Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11697/) (2024)
- [There is a Time and Place for Reasoning Beyond the Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00758/) (2022)
- [Can Vision-Language Models be a Good Guesser? Exploring VLMs for Times and Location Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06166/) (2023)
- [RED-DOT: Multimodal Fact-checking via Relevant Evidence Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09939/) (2023)
- [AVerImaTeC: A Dataset for Automatic Verification of Image-Text Claims with Evidence from the Web](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17978/) (2025)
- [COVE: COntext and VEracity prediction for out-of-context images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.01194/) (2025)
- [M4FC: a Multimodal, Multilingual, Multicultural, Multitask Real-World Fact-Checking Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.23508/) (2025)
- [Assessing News Thumbnail Representativeness: Counterfactual text can enhance the cross-modal matching ability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11159/) (2024)
- [GETReason: Enhancing Image Context Extraction through Hierarchical Multi-Agent Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21863/) (2025)
- [PuzzleGPT: Emulating Human Puzzle-Solving Ability for Time and Location Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.14210/) (2025)
- [Fact-Checking at Scale: Multimodal AI for Authenticity and Context Verification in Online Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.08592/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Identifying when and where a news image was taken is crucial for journalists and forensic experts to produce credible stories and debunk misinformation. While many existing methods rely on reverse image search (RIS) engines, these tools often fail to return results, thereby limiting their practical applicability. In this work, we address the challenging scenario where RIS evidence is unavailable. We investigate the potential of news article corpora as an alternative to RIS, linking images to relevant articles to infer their dates and locations from article metadata. We evaluate the performance of a news article retrieval pipeline, NewsRECON, which leverages a corpus of over 85,000 articles. Experiments on the TARA dataset show that NewsRECON outperforms prior work and can be combined with a multimodal large language model (MLLM) to achieve new SOTA results in the absence of RIS evidence. Furthermore, NewsRECON generalizes to the 5Pils-OOC benchmark despite geographic and temporal shifts. We make our code available.