CSI: An Investigative Multi-Agent Framework for Explainable Short Video Fake News Detection

Yuxin Wang, Yang Yang, Huaiwen Zhang


Abstract
The proliferation of short video fake news threatens social stability. Current detection methods rely either on black-box Multimodal Small Language Models (MSLMs), which suffer from poor explainability and superficial understanding, or on specific prompt strategies for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) that underutilize their reasoning capabilities and knowledge. To address these challenges, we propose a novel multi-agent framework named CSI for short video fake news detection. CSI implements two key units: 1) Multimodal Forensics Unit (MFU), which performs synchronous multimodal deconstruction and external knowledge retrieval to collect comprehensive evidence. 2) Case Review Unit (CRU), which first employs collaborative discussion to facilitate viewpoint interaction to obtain the review result. Subsequently, the Adjudicator integrates evidence and the review result via multiple attention mechanisms to interact with the news, ensuring a robust verdict.Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate that CSI provides rigorous explanations while achieving state-of-the-art performance. Our code is available at: https://github.com/VFCenter/CSI.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-acl.1274
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, United States
Editors:
Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
Venue:
Findings
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
25508–25528
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.1274/
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Cite (ACL):
Yuxin Wang, Yang Yang, and Huaiwen Zhang. 2026. CSI: An Investigative Multi-Agent Framework for Explainable Short Video Fake News Detection. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026, pages 25508–25528, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
CSI: An Investigative Multi-Agent Framework for Explainable Short Video Fake News Detection (Wang et al., Findings 2026)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.1274.pdf
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