Incorrect information poses significant challenges by disrupting content veracity and integrity, yet most detection approaches struggle to jointly balance textual content verification with external knowledge modification under collapsed attention geometries. To address this issue, we propose a dual-head reasoning framework, BiMind, which disentangles content-internal reasoning from knowledge-augmented reasoning. In BiMind, we introduce three core innovations: (i) an attention geometry adapter that reshapes attention logits via token-conditioned offsets and mitigates attention collapse; (ii) a self-retrieval knowledge mechanism, which constructs an in-domain semantic memory through kNN retrieval and injects retrieved neighbors via feature-wise linear modulation; (iii) the uncertainty-aware fusion strategies, including entropy-gated fusion and a trainable agreement head, stabilized by a symmetric Kullback-Leibler agreement regularizer. To quantify the knowledge contributions, we define a novel metric, Value-of-eXperience (VoX), to measure instance-wise logit gains from knowledge-augmented reasoning. Experiment results on public datasets demonstrate that our BiMind model outperforms advanced detection approaches and provides interpretable diagnostics on when and why knowledge matters.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Illustrative case of self-correction via knowledge: without knowledge (left), the content-internal head labels Lafufu (counterfeit Labubu) as Labubu; with knowledge (right), the knowledge-augmented head corrects the label as Lafufu.
Figure 2: An illustration of our proposed BiMind framework. (a) Dual-head architecture with a content-internal head (top) and a knowledge-augmented head (bottom). (b) Attention geometry adapter reshapes pre-softmax attention logits via token-conditioned offsets. (c) Self-retrieval knowledge module retrieves top- k neighbors and injects knowledge via FiLM to provide knowledge-augmented representations. (d) Uncertainty-aware fusion combines head logits via an entropy gating, with the VoX metric quantifying the knowledge contributions by comparing head outcomes, where blue and green surfaces in the instance space represent the content and knowledge reasoning heads, respectively.
Figure 3: Illustration of the attention maps with ( + ) and without AGA across shallow (Layer 0) and deep (Layer 9) layers. AGA induces a structured, token-conditioned attention pattern at deeper layers, reshaping attention distribution by injecting global, key-focused inductive bias.
Dataset
CNN
GCN
BERT
HAN
HeteroSGT
BiMind
Acc
Pre
Acc
Pre
Acc
Pre
Acc
Pre
Acc
Pre
Acc
Pre
MM COVID
0.582±0.035
0.478±0.170
0.717±0.156
0.735±0.236
0.730±0.093
0.727±0.094
0.855±0.005
0.854±0.005
0.915±0.009
0.905±0.011
0.951±0.008
0.950±0.011
ReCOVery
0.658±0.011
0.460±0.104
0.718±0.037
0.691±0.178
0.682±0.030
0.441±0.213
0.722±0.021
0.462±0.197
0.727±0.023
0.731±0.047
0.918±0.013
0.922±0.013
MC Fake
0.825±0.001
0.544±0.156
0.724±0.138
0.516±0.169
0.827±0.006
0.713±0.271
0.825±0.005
0.463±0.098
0.883±0.002
0.812±0.003
0.887±0.005
0.827±0.006
LIAR
0.546±0.019
0.432±0.181
0.487±0.039
0.493±0.047
0.537±0.007
0.513±0.017
0.546±0.025
0.493±0.036
0.581±0.002
0.580±0.003
0.633±0.001
0.637±0.002
Dataset
Rec
F1
Rec
F1
Rec
F1
Rec
F1
Rec
F1
Rec
F1
Table 1: Detection performance on four datasets (best in red , second-best in blue ).
Dataset
Head/Mode
Acc
F1
Pre
Rec
VoX (mean / pos%)
Gate Mean (% < 0.3 / % > 0.7)
ReCOVery
Head0
85.22
85.15
85.10
85.22
–
–
HeadE
87.19
86.93
86.98
87.19
+0.47 / 84.24%
0.04 (100.00% / 0.00%)
Fused
87.19
86.93
86.98
87.19
–
0.04 (100.00% / 0.00%)
MC Fake
Head0
86.50
84.85
84.79
86.50
–
–
HeadE
87.35
86.90
86.63
87.35
-0.08 / 39.91%
0.22 (81.24% / 0.00%)
Fused
87.42
86.82
86.52
87.42
–
0.22 (81.24% / 0.00%)
Table 2: Cross-dataset VoX results. We report mean VoX value and percentage of samples with positive gain (pos%); we also show mean gate value and routing mass below/above thresholds, with % < 0.3 indicating the gate leaned strongly toward knowledge head HeadE , and % > 0.7 indicating it leaned strongly toward content head Head0 .
Model Variant
Acc
Pre
Rec
F1
Full BiMind model (w/ knowledge)
0.897
0.895
0.897
0.895
Baseline (content w/o knowledge)
0.852
0.849
0.852
0.848
– Attention geometry adapter
0.872
0.870
0.872
0.870
– Knowledge retrieval
0.847
0.847
0.847
0.847
– Gated fusion
0.862
0.861
0.862
0.861
– Trainable agreement head
0.867
0.868
0.867
0.867
Table 3: Ablation study on ReCOVery dataset. One module is removed at a time from the full BiMind model.
Appendix figures & tables10 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Model
Model Size
Trainable Params
Ratio
BiMind-Custom (Tiny)
3.5M
3.5M
100%
BiMind-RoBERTa (Medium)
125M
3.3M
2.6%
BiMind-LLaMA (Large)
7B
44.4M
< 1%
Appendix
Table 4: Parameter efficiency across BiMind variants.
Dataset
# Label 0
# Label 1
# Total
Avg. Length (words)
MM COVID
1,888
1,162
3,048
25
RoCOVery
605
1,294
1,899
500
LIAR
2,507
2,053
4,560
17
MC Fake
2,671
12,621
15,292
300
Appendix
Table 5: Statistics of the datasets used in our experiments.
Dataset
Vocab Alignment (%)
Max Sim.
Mean Sim.
Flesch (helps)
LIAR
76.55
0.6603±0.0924
0.6077±0.0843
37.94
MM COVID
75.60
0.7586±0.1228
0.6870±0.1082
31.68
MC Fake
79.91
0.8176±0.1084
0.7751±0.1082
-280.47
ReCOVery
81.68
0.8056±0.1071
0.7567±0.1026
-585.00
Appendix
Table 6: Statistical comparison of knowledge attributes across datasets. Vocabulary alignment measures lexical intersection between inputs and the knowledge base. Retrieval relevance is reported as cosine similarity (mean ± std). Flesch Reading Ease for the helps category reflects the linguistic complexity of retrieved knowledge.
Metric
Content Head
Knowledge Head
Fused
Accuracy
68.2%
61.5% (-6.7%)
70.1% (+1.9%)
F1-Score
0.65
0.58
0.68
Appendix
Table 7: Empirical results on fusion strategy.
Knowledge Impact
% of Test Set
Interpretation
Helps (wrong → correct)
∼ 15%
Genuine knowledge benefit
Hurts (correct → wrong)
∼ 8%
Knowledge introduces noise
Neutral / Both Wrong
∼ 77%
No leaked advantage
Appendix
Table 8: Knowledge impact on data leakage.
Model
Dataset
Head/Mode
Acc
F1
Pre
Rec
LLaMA-7B
ReCOVery
Head0
91.13 ± 2.34
91.03 ± 2.59
91.35 ± 2.32
91.13 ± 2.34
HeadE
91.04 ± 1.18
91.09 ± 1.21
91.53 ± 1.44
91.04 ± 1.18
Fused
91.82 ± 1.29
91.86 ± 1.27
92.20 ± 1.26
91.82 ± 1.29
MM COVID
Head0
94.69 ± 1.01
94.70 ± 1.01
94.46 ± 1.45
94.67 ± 0.99
HeadE
94.80 ± 0.77
94.81 ± 0.76
94.48 ± 1.21
94.61 ± 0.64
Fused
95.12 ± 0.78
95.12 ± 0.78
94.98 ± 1.06
95.08 ± 0.86
Appendix
Table 9: Extended performance comparison (mean ± std, in %, across 10 runs, best in bold ).
Dataset
Model
Acc
Pre
Rec
F1
Training
Testing
Graph
MM COVID
HeteroSGT
0.915±0.009
0.905±0.011
0.883±0.013
0.893±0.011
55.11
–
13.62
BiMind
0.902±0.116
0.902±0.110
0.898±0.142
0.900±0.132
15.19
0.08
–
ReCOVery
HeteroSGT
0.727±0.023
0.731±0.047
0.585±0.036
0.571±0.049
21.94
–
9.03
BiMind
0.879±0.017
0.862±0.028
0.843±0.203
0.854±0.208
14.99
0.10
–
MC Fake
HeteroSGT
0.883±0.002
0.812±0.003
0.762±0.002
0.783±0.003
478.53
–
40.04
BiMind
0.887±0.051
0.827±0.016
0.700±0.099
0.798±0.109
153.01
0.45
–
Appendix
Table 10: Performance and runtime comparison between BiMind and HeteroSGT across four benchmark datasets. Performance is reported as mean ± std. Runtime is measured in seconds per run.
Method
Accuracy
F1
Improvement
kNN (k=5)
83.74%
83.54%
-
kNN-BERT (k=5)
83.74%
83.54%
-
Standard RAG (k=3)
83.25%
83.00%
-0.49%
BiMind (Ours)
87.70%
87.90%
+3.96%
Appendix
Table 11: Comparison with retrieval-based baselines on ReCOVery.
Figure 4: An illustration of knowledge impacts at the instance level. Blue curve = baseline (no knowledge), red dashed curve = with knowledge, shaded regions indicate gain (green) or loss (orange).
Figure 5: Layer 9 attention head specialization with and without AGA. Left: Baseline Transformer without AGA. Right: Transformer with AGA.
This paper introduces a hybrid fact-checking framework that integrates Knowledge Graph-based semantic memory with adversarial multi-agent reasoning for explainable misinformation detection. The proposed system follows a memory-first, web-fallback architecture, in which input claims are initially evaluated against a dual-index Knowledge Graph through Sentence-BERT-based semantic retrieval and Natural Language Inference. When the evidence retrieved from the graph is insufficient to support a reliable decision, the framework collects information from trusted web sources and assesses it using an adversarial tribunal composed of support, contradiction, and judging agents. A graph-aware confidence mechanism combines semantic similarity, NLI confidence, and structural graph evidence to determine whether internal knowledge is sufficient, thereby reducing unnecessary web retrieval. Following verification, validated information is transformed into structured triples and incorporated into the Knowledge Graph, supporting the incremental expansion of the system's semantic memory. Experimental evaluation on a curated COVID-19 misinformation benchmark demonstrates that the proposed framework achieves an accuracy of 97.4% and a macro-averaged F1-score of 92.6% on resolved claims, outperforming a Llama3.370B baseline, which obtains an accuracy of 87.7% and a macro-averaged F1-score of 86.3%.
Reasoning Language Models (RLMs) have significantly improved performance on complex tasks by extending the reasoning chain. However, these chains are prone to containing factual errors, particularly in knowledge-intensive tasks. To address this issue, we propose CheckRLM, a framework that improves the reliability of the reasoning process through Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) by timely checking and correcting factual errors. Specifically, CheckRLM extracts factual claims from the reasoning chain to identify and localize subtle knowledge inconsistencies during inference. Upon detection of errors, a refinement mechanism performs minimal-cost yet precise corrections by leveraging external knowledge, ensuring coherence between the reasoning chain and correct knowledge. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CheckRLM substantially outperforms existing baselines, exhibiting a strong capability to mitigate error accumulation in long-horizon reasoning with lower costs. The code and data are available at https://github.com/AI9Stars/CheckRLM.
Dingling Xu, Ruobing Wang, Qingfei Zhao +8
School of Artificial Intelligence, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China · Beijing Key Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence for Education, Beijing 100875, China · Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences +3
Real-world multimodal misinformation often involves mixed forgery sources, requiring sample-specific detection strategies. Existing tool-augmented methods rely on predefined workflows or inference-time planning, limiting adaptability or increasing inference cost. To address this issue, we introduce MM-VeriAgent, which learns to verify mixed-source multimodal misinformation with tools. We first build MM-VeriTools, a specialized toolkit for misinformation detection agents. By benchmarking various candidate models and methods on the sub-tasks required by mixed-source detection, we select the strongest for textual, visual, and cross-modal forgery analysis and encapsulate them as callable tools with a unified interface. On top of this toolkit, we train the LVLM agent with reinforcement learning to teach it how to use these tools to better solve mixed-source detection. Since many of the tools are specialized models whose online execution at every rollout severely limits RL efficiency, we further introduce Tool-Execution Cache, which pre-executes candidate tool calls and reuses their cached outputs during training. This preserves multi-step rollouts while reducing online tool execution, largely improving the training efficiency.Experiments on MMFakeBench demonstrate substantial accuracy gains over the base model without explicit tool search at inference time. Ablation and efficiency analyses further validate the learned tool-use policy and show that Tool-Execution Cache reduces online tool executions during training.
Peipei Li, Shuhan Xia, Shengyang Liu +2
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications · Minzu University of China · NLPR, Institute of automation, Chinese academy of science, Chinese Academy of Sciences