From Form to Logic: Masked Reconstruction and Reasoning Distillation for Short Video Fake News Detection

Qingyan Wang, Lianwei Wu, Botao Wang, Wangkang, Yaxiong Wang


Abstract
The rapid growth of short video platforms has made multimodal fake news more prevalent. Existing detectors suffer from two major limitations: (I) global-alignment bias that overemphasizes holistic cross-modal matching and thus misses subtle, localized inconsistencies; and (II) LLM-based methods that leverage powerful generative reasoning to identify cognitive forgeries but inherently suffer from hallucinations and high inference latency. To overcome these limitations, we propose PCDD, a novel Perception-Cognition Dual-driven Detector that jointly observes the form and probes the logic for short video fake news detection. The perception stream exposes fine-grained cross-modal conflicts by amplifying localized inconsistencies into explicit discrepancies. The cognition stream transfers reasoning capabilities from LLMs to a lightweight student to mine cognitive forgeries, while reducing the risk of hallucinations and eliminating reliance on LLMs at inference. Experiments on real-world datasets show that PCDD consistently outperforms baselines, while improving interpretability and robustness in data scarcity scenarios. Our code is available at: https://github.com/SeinCore/PCDD.
Anthology ID:
2026.acl-long.579
Volume:
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, United States
Editors:
Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
12698–12711
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.579/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Qingyan Wang, Lianwei Wu, Botao Wang, Wangkang, and Yaxiong Wang. 2026. From Form to Logic: Masked Reconstruction and Reasoning Distillation for Short Video Fake News Detection. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 12698–12711, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
From Form to Logic: Masked Reconstruction and Reasoning Distillation for Short Video Fake News Detection (Wang et al., ACL 2026)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.579.pdf
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