Checking Fact with Better Retrieval: Dynamic Contrastive Learning for Evidence Retrieval

In the field of multimodal fact checking, the accuracy of retrieving evidence from different modalities has a significant impact on the downstream claim verification process. Existing general multimodal retrieval methods are often constructed based on semantics, resulting in the retrieved evidence being similar but not relevant to the claim. This paper proposes a Dynamic Adaptive Contrastive Learning method for evidence Retrieval called DACLR to address these issues. DACLR first uses a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) to uniformly convert multimodal evidence and claims into text modalities, and extracts the features of these information at event level. Then, it conducts evidence retrieval through a two-stage retrieval method of recall-rerank. DACLR enhances the model's event perception ability of the retrieval stage by optimizing the contrastive loss and mining hard negative samples. Specifically, DACLR designs three loss functions at two levels (semantic and event) based on the InfoNCE loss.Corresponding to these, three sets of hard negative sample candidates are set up. The model dynamically adjusts the ratio based on the accuracy supervision signal of intra-batch samples, allowing the model to learn the correlation between claims and positive samples at the event level without forgetting the semantic retrieval ability. Extensive comparison and ablation experiments demonstrates the effectiveness of DACLR and its internal optimization methods. Further research also prove the advantages of DACLR in the field of multimodal evidence retrieval.