Multimodal misinformation, encompassing textual, visual, and cross-modal distortions, poses an increasing societal threat that is amplified by generative AI. Existing methods typically focus on a single type of distortion and struggle to generalize to unseen scenarios. In this work, we observe that different distortion types share common reasoning capabilities while also requiring task-specific skills. We hypothesize that joint training across distortion types facilitates knowledge sharing and enhances the model’s ability to generalize. To this end, we introduce TRUST-VL, a unified and explainable vision-language model for general multimodal misinformation detection. TRUST-VL incorporates a novel Question-Aware Visual Amplifier module, designed to extract task-specific visual features. To support training, we also construct TRUST-Instruct, a large-scale instruction dataset containing 198K samples featuring structured reasoning chains aligned with human fact-checking workflows. Extensive experiments on both in-domain and zero-shot benchmarks demonstrate that TRUST-VL achieves state-of-the-art performance, while also offering strong generalization and interpretability.

The growing number of online articles and reviews necessitates innovative techniques for document-level aspect-based sentiment analysis. Capturing the context in which an aspect is mentioned is crucial. Existing models have focused on relatively short reviews and may fail to consider distant contextual information. This is especially so in longer documents where an aspect may be referred to in multiple ways across dispersed sentences. This work introduces a hierarchical Transformer-based architecture that encodes information at different level of granularities with attention aggregation mechanisms to learn the local and global aspect-specific document representations. For empirical validation, we curate two datasets of long documents: one on social issues, and another covering various topics involving trust-related issues. Experimental results show that the proposed architecture outperforms state-of-the-art methods for document-level aspect-based sentiment classification. We also demonstrate the potential applicability of our approach for long document trust prediction.