MRAFnd: Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Framework for Zero-Shot Fake News Detection
This work addresses the challenge of multimodal fake news detection for emerging events in zero-shot scenarios, where existing methods often overlook the reuse patterns of historical disinformation and subtle cross-modal inconsistencies. To tackle this, we propose the first framework that integrates retrieval augmentation with multi-agent collaborative debate: it first retrieves relevant historical news articles via multimodal similarity search, then leverages bidirectional evidence reasoning within a structured debate mechanism to assess veracity. By effectively capturing cross-modal discrepancies and characteristic patterns of past deceptive strategies, our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods across three benchmark datasets, achieving an accuracy improvement of up to 2.35% on Weibo-21.