# An Information-theoretic Propagation Denoising and Fusion Framework for Fake News Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.02259 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.02259/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 30)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [Inductive Representation Learning on Large Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02216/) (2017)
- [Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6114/) (2013)
- [DeBERTa: Decoding-enhanced BERT with Disentangled Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03654/) (2020)
- [Deep Variational Information Bottleneck](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00410/) (2016)
- [Trusted Multi-View Classification with Dynamic Evidential Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.11423/) (2022)
- [Rumor Detection on Social Media with Bi-Directional Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06362/) (2020)
- [CSI: A Hybrid Deep Model for Fake News Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06959/) (2017)
- [User Preference-aware Fake News Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.12259/) (2021)
- [Bad Actor, Good Advisor: Exploring the Role of Large Language Models in Fake News Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.12247/) (2023)
- [Do Large Language Models know what humans know?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.01515/) (2022)
- [From Skepticism to Acceptance: Simulating the Attitude Dynamics Toward Fake News](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09498/) (2024)
- [The Role of User Profile for Fake News Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.13355/) (2019)
- [Detect Rumors in Microblog Posts for Low-Resource Domains via Adversarial Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08143/) (2022)
- [DELL: Generating Reactions and Explanations for LLM-Based Misinformation Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10426/) (2024)
- [Towards Propagation Uncertainty: Edge-enhanced Bayesian Graph Convolutional Networks for Rumor Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.11934/) (2021)
- [MOSAIC: Modeling Social AI for Content Dissemination and Regulation in Multi-Agent Simulations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07830/) (2025)
- [CED: Credible Early Detection of Social Media Rumors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.04175/) (2018)
- [Learning Reporting Dynamics during Breaking News for Rumour Detection in Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.07363/) (2016)
- [Supervised Adversarial Contrastive Learning for Emotion Recognition in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01505/) (2023)
- [Let Silence Speak: Enhancing Fake News Detection with Generated Comments from Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16631/) (2024)
- [Explore the Potential of LLMs in Misinformation Detection: An Empirical Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12699/) (2023)
- [TELLER: A Trustworthy Framework for Explainable, Generalizable and Controllable Fake News Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07776/) (2024)
- [Propagation Tree Is Not Deep: Adaptive Graph Contrastive Learning Approach for Rumor Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.07201/) (2025)
- [Epidemiology-informed Network for Robust Rumor Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.12949/) (2024)
- [Collaboration and Controversy Among Experts: Rumor Early Detection by Tuning a Comment Generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04076/) (2025)
- [Decompose to Understand, Fuse to Detect: Frequency-Decoupled Anomaly Detection for Encrypted Network Traffic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.02970/) (2026)
- [Local Perceptions and Practices of News Sharing and Fake News](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07607/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Incomplete propagation data significantly hinders robust fake news detection. Recent approaches leverage large language models to simulate missing user interactions via role-playing, thereby enriching propagation with synthetic signals. However, such propagation data is intrinsically unreliable, and directly fusing it can lead to biased representations and limited detection performance. In this paper, we alleviate the unreliability of synthetic propagation from the mutual information perspective and propose a novel information-theoretic propagation denoising and fusion (InfoPDF) framework to learn effective representations from both real and synthetic propagation. Specifically, we first generate attribute-specific synthetic propagation using large language models. Then we model each synthetic propagation graph as a probabilistic latent distribution to guide reliability-aware adaptive fusion with real propagation. During training, we design a mutual information-based objective to learn compressed and task-sufficient propagation representations. It jointly suppresses noisy signals across attribute-specific synthetic propagation, maintains consistency between real and synthetic propagation representations, and ensures task sufficiency for fake news detection and attribute prediction. Experiments on three real-world datasets show that InfoPDF consistently achieves superior performance across various fake news detection tasks. Further analysis demonstrates that InfoPDF can estimate attribute-level reliabilities and learn more discriminative propagation representations.