Dialectical Structured Reasoning for Explainable Multimodal Fake News Detection

摘要

Current multimodal fake news detectors predominantly function as opaque classifiers, offering limited deductive transparency and little insight into how conflicting evidence is reconciled. To address this limitation, we propose Dialectical Structured Reasoning (DSR), a framework modeling fake news detection as an explicit dialectical process over multimodal social context. DSR instantiates two opposing agents: a Verifier, which constructs evidence paths supporting semantic consistency, and a Debunker, which actively explores exposing logical or factual contradictions. Then a differentiable Judge agent adjudicates between these competing perspectives by integrating local evidence with global parametric knowledge. Experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate that DSR achieves state-of-the-art performance while producing transparent, dialectically grounded explanations that closely mirror human reasoning process.