GCML: Gradient Coherence Guided Meta-Learning for Cross-Domain Emerging Topic Rumor Detection

Zejiang He, Jingyuan Huang, Menglong Lu, Zhen Huang, Shanshan Liu, Zhiliang Tian, Dongsheng Li


Abstract
With the emergence of new topics on social media as sources of rumor propagation, addressing the domain shift between the source and target domain and the target domain samples scarcity remains a crucial task in cross-domain rumor detection. Traditional deep learning-based methods and LLM-based methods are mostly focused on the in-domain condition, thus having poor performance in cross-domain setting. Existing domain adaptation rumor detection approaches ignore the data generalization differences and rely on a large amount of unlabeled target domain samples to achieve domain adaptation, resulting in less effective on emerging topic rumor detection. In this paper, we propose a Gradient Coherence guided Meta-Learning approach (GCML) for emerging topics rumor detection. Firstly, we calculate the task generalization score of each source task (sampled from source domain) from a gradient coherence perspective, and selectively learn more “generalizable” tasks that are more beneficial in adapting to the target domain. Secondly, we leverage meta-learning to alleviate the target domain samples scarcity, which utilizes task generalization scores to re-weight meta-test gradients and adaptively updates learning rate. Extensive experimental results on real-world datasets show that our method substantially outperforms SOTA baselines.
Anthology ID:
2025.emnlp-main.968
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Christos Christodoulopoulos, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Carolyn Rose, Violet Peng
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
19159–19173
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.emnlp-main.968/
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Cite (ACL):
Zejiang He, Jingyuan Huang, Menglong Lu, Zhen Huang, Shanshan Liu, Zhiliang Tian, and Dongsheng Li. 2025. GCML: Gradient Coherence Guided Meta-Learning for Cross-Domain Emerging Topic Rumor Detection. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 19159–19173, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
GCML: Gradient Coherence Guided Meta-Learning for Cross-Domain Emerging Topic Rumor Detection (He et al., EMNLP 2025)
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