CogniDir: Combating Cognitive Malicious Comments via Adaptive Distributional Learning for Robust Fake News Detection

To efficiently combat the spread of LLM-generated misinformation in the news domain, we present RADAR, a Retrieval-Augmented Detector with Adversarial Refinement for adaptive LLM-generated fake news detection. Our approach employs a generator that rewrites real articles with factual perturbations, paired with a lightweight detector that verifies claims using dense passage retrieval. To enable effective co-evolution, we introduce Verbal Adversarial Feedback (VAF). Rather than relying on scalar rewards, VAF issues structured natural-language critiques; these guide the generator toward more sophisticated evasion attempts, compelling the detector to adapt and improve. Experiments on an LLM-generated fake news benchmark show that RADAR outperforms retrieval-augmented trainable baselines and general-purpose LLMs with retrieval. Further analysis shows that retrieval on both the generator and detector sides improves performance, while VAF and few-shot demonstrations offer complementary benefits. RADAR also transfers better to fake news generated by an unseen external attacker, suggesting improved generalization beyond the specific co-evolved generator used during training.

Propagation structures provide crucial evidence for fake news detection, yet existing approaches primarily rely on supervised GNN-based models, which require substantial labeled data and exhibit limited generalization. Although large language models (LLMs) exhibit strong reasoning capabilities, directly feeding them raw propagation graphs creates a significant modality mismatch and severe information overload, making structure-aware reasoning unreliable in zero-shot and few-shot settings. To bridge this gap, we propose MAGER, a multi-agent genetic evolution framework that automatically discovers meta-paths optimized for LLM reasoning. By compressing complex propagation graphs into informative subgraphs, the evolved meta-paths alleviate both information overload and modality mismatch, enabling frozen LLMs to perform structure-aware veracity reasoning. We further introduce a graph in-context learning strategy that retrieves semantically and structurally similar demonstrations to strengthen classification and reasoning. Extensive experiments show that MAGER substantially improves frozen LLMs as standalone fake news detectors in data-efficient settings. Our code is available at https://github.com/SenticNet/MAGER.

Detecting machine-generated disinformation on social media is increasingly difficult as large language models (LLMs) make it easier to generate and rewrite misleading content at scale. Static benchmark evaluations, measuring detector performance on fixed held-out datasets, do not capture how detectors behave when posts are deliberately transformed to evade classification. This paper adapts the Build it, Break it, Fix it framework into Build it, Break it, Repeat (BiBiR): iterative sessions designed to stress-test detectors' robustness under iterative adversarial conditions, evaluating whether models remain reliable when disinformation posts are systematically transformed to evade classification. Across five iterations, the findings show that the best adversarial breakers' transformations came from a combination of back-translation and LLM persona-based rewriting, with the best performing technique achieving a 95% label flip rate (LFR), whilst still preserving the meaning of the original posts. The best builders' model was a triplet contrastive model with a dynamic anchor switching (DASS) architecture, which achieved an average accuracy of 72.68%, outperforming the strong baseline (a fine-tuned e5-small-LoRA) by 15 percentage points on the most robust set of breakers' adversarial attacks. The results demonstrate that an iterative framework best exposes detector weaknesses and pushes robustness improvements; however, it may still require semantic preservation analysis to distinguish valid adversarial evasion from transformations that changed the original disinformation claims' meaning.