Repository for the paper "RED-DOT: Multimodal Fact-checking via Relevant Evidence Detection" published in IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems.
Online misinformation is often multimodal in nature, i.e., it is caused by misleading associations between texts and accompanying images. To support the fact-checking process, researchers have been recently developing automatic multimodal methods that gather and analyze external information, evidence, related to the image-text pairs under examination. However, prior works assumed all collected evidence to be relevant. In this study, we introduce a “Relevant Evidence Detection” (RED) module to discern whether each piece of evidence is relevant, to support or refute the claim. Specifically, we develop the “Relevant Evidence Detection Directed Transformer” (RED-DOT) and explore multiple architectural variants (e.g., single or dual-stage) and mechanisms (e.g., “guided attention”). Extensive ablation and comparative experiments demonstrate that RED-DOT achieves significant improvements over the state-of-the-art on the VERITE benchmark by up to 28.5%. Furthermore, our evidence re-ranking and element-wise modality fusion led to RED-DOT achieving competitive and even improved performance on NewsCLIPings+, without the need for numerous evidence or multiple backbone encoders. Finally, our qualitative analysis demonstrates that the proposed “guided attention” module has the potential to enhance the architecture’s interpretability.
- Clone this repo:
git clone https://github.com/stevejpapad/relevant-evidence-detection
cd relevant-evidence-detection
- Create a python (>= 3.9) environment (Anaconda is recommended)
- Install all dependencies with:
pip install --file requirements.txt.
If you want to reproduce the experiments on the paper it is necessary to first download the following datasets and save them in their respective folder:
- VisualNews -> https://github.com/FuxiaoLiu/VisualNews-Repository ->
data/VisualNews/ - NewsCLIPings -> https://github.com/g-luo/news_clippings ->
data/news_clippings/ - NewsCLIPings evidence -> https://github.com/S-Abdelnabi/OoC-multi-modal-fc ->
data/news_clippings/queries_dataset/ - VERITE -> https://github.com/stevejpapad/image-text-verification ->
data/VERITE/(Although we provide all necessary files as well as the external evidence)
If you encounter any problems while downloading and preparing VERITE (e.g., broken image URLs), please contact [email protected]
To prepare the datasets, extract CLIP features and reproduce all experiments run:
python src/main.py
If you find our work useful, please cite:
@article{papadopoulos2025red,
title={Red-dot: Multimodal fact-checking via relevant evidence detection},
author={Papadopoulos, Stefanos-Iordanis and Koutlis, Christos and Papadopoulos, Symeon and Petrantonakis, Panagiotis C},
journal={IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems},
year={2025},
publisher={IEEE}
}
This work is partially funded by the project "vera.ai: VERification Assisted by Artificial Intelligence" under grant agreement no. 101070093.
This project is licensed under the Apache License 2.0 - see the LICENSE file for more details.
Stefanos-Iordanis Papadopoulos ([email protected])