Fake news detection is a critical problem in today’s digital age, aiming to classify intentionally misleading or fabricated news content. In this study, we present a transformer and LLM-based ensemble method to address the challenges in fake news detection. We explored various machine learning (ML), deep learning (DL), transformer, and LLM-based approaches on a Malayalam fake news detection dataset. Our findings highlight the difficulties faced by traditional ML and DL methods in accurately detecting fake news, while transformer- and LLM-based ensemble methods demonstrate significant improvements in performance. The ensemble method combining Sarvam-1, Malayalam-BERT, and XLM-R outperformed all other approaches, achieving an F1-score of 89.30% on the given dataset. This accomplishment, which contributed to securing 2nd place in the shared task at DravidianLangTech 2025, underscores the importance of developing effective methods for detecting fake news in Dravidian languages.

Misogyny memes, a form of digital content, reflect societal prejudices by discriminating against women through shaming and stereotyping. In this study, we present a multimodal approach combining Indic-BERT and ViT-base-patch16-224 to address misogyny memes. We explored various Machine Learning, Deep Learning, and Transformer models for unimodal and multimodal classification using provided Tamil and Malayalam meme dataset. Our findings highlight the challenges traditional ML and DL models face in understanding the nuances of Dravidian languages, while emphasizing the importance of transformer models in capturing these complexities. Our multimodal method achieved F1-scores of 77.18% and 84.11% in Tamil and Malayalam, respectively, securing 6th place for both languages among the participants.