Media
MCP-Orchestrated Multi-Agent System for Automated Disinformation Detection
Avram, Alexandru-Andrei, Groza, Adrian, Lecu, Alexandru
The large spread of disinformation across digital platforms creates significant challenges to information integrity. This paper presents a multi-agent system that uses relation extraction to detect disinformation in news articles, focusing on titles and short text snippets. The proposed Agentic AI system combines four agents: (i) a machine learning agent (logistic regression), (ii) a Wikipedia knowledge check agent (which relies on named entity recognition), (iii) a coherence detection agent (using LLM prompt engineering), and (iv) a web-scraped data analyzer that extracts relational triplets for fact checking. The system is orchestrated via the Model Context Protocol (MCP), offering shared context and live learning across components. Results demonstrate that the multi-agent ensemble achieves 95.3% accuracy with an F1 score of 0.964, significantly outperforming individual agents and traditional approaches. The weighted aggregation method, mathematically derived from individual agent misclassification rates, proves superior to algorithmic threshold optimization. The modular architecture makes the system easily scalable, while also maintaining details of the decision processes.
An Audit and Analysis of LLM-Assisted Health Misinformation Jailbreaks Against LLMs
Hussain, Ayana, Zhao, Patrick, Vincent, Nicholas
Large Language Models (LLMs) are a double-edged sword capable of generating harmful misinformation -- inadvertently, or when prompted by "jailbreak" attacks that attempt to produce malicious outputs. LLMs could, with additional research, be used to detect and prevent the spread of misinformation. In this paper, we investigate the efficacy and characteristics of LLM-produced jailbreak attacks that cause other models to produce harmful medical misinformation. We also study how misinformation generated by jailbroken LLMs compares to typical misinformation found on social media, and how effectively it can be detected using standard machine learning approaches. Specifically, we closely examine 109 distinct attacks against three target LLMs and compare the attack prompts to in-the-wild health-related LLM queries. We also examine the resulting jailbreak responses, comparing the generated misinformation to health-related misinformation on Reddit. Our findings add more evidence that LLMs can be effectively used to detect misinformation from both other LLMs and from people, and support a body of work suggesting that with careful design, LLMs can contribute to a healthier overall information ecosystem.
HiFACTMix: A Code-Mixed Benchmark and Graph-Aware Model for EvidenceBased Political Claim Verification in Hinglish
Thakur, Rakesh, Sharma, Sneha, Chopra, Gauri
Fact-checking in code-mixed, low-resource languages such as Hinglish remains an underexplored challenge in natural language processing. Existing fact-verification systems largely focus on high-resource, monolingual settings and fail to generalize to real-world political discourse in linguis - tically diverse regions like India. Given the widespread use of Hinglish by public figures, particularly political figures, and the growing influence of social media on public opin - ion, there's a critical need for robust, multilingual and con - text-aware fact-checking tools. To address this gap a novel benchmark HiFACT dataset is introduced with 1,500 real-world factual claims made by 28 Indian state Chief Minis - ters in Hinglish, under a highly code-mixed low-resource setting. Each claim is annotated with textual evidence and veracity labels. To evaluate this benchmark, a novel graph-aware, retrieval-augmented fact-checking model is proposed that combines multilingual contextual encoding, claim-evi - dence semantic alignment, evidence graph construction, graph neural reasoning, and natural language explanation generation. Experimental results show that HiFACTMix outperformed accuracy in comparison to state of art multi - lingual baselines models and provides faithful justifications for its verdicts. This work opens a new direction for multi - lingual, code-mixed, and politically grounded fact verifica - tion research..
XFacta: Contemporary, Real-World Dataset and Evaluation for Multimodal Misinformation Detection with Multimodal LLMs
Xiao, Yuzhuo, Han, Zeyu, Wang, Yuhan, Jiang, Huaizu
The rapid spread of multimodal misinformation on social media calls for more effective and robust detection methods. Recent advances leveraging multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown the potential in addressing this challenge. However, it remains unclear exactly where the bottleneck of existing approaches lies (evidence retrieval v.s. reasoning), hindering the further advances in this field. On the dataset side, existing benchmarks either contain outdated events, leading to evaluation bias due to discrepancies with contemporary social media scenarios as MLLMs can simply memorize these events, or artificially synthetic, failing to reflect real-world misinformation patterns. Additionally, it lacks comprehensive analyses of MLLM-based model design strategies. To address these issues, we introduce XFacta, a contemporary, real-world dataset that is better suited for evaluating MLLM-based detectors. We systematically evaluate various MLLM-based misinformation detection strategies, assessing models across different architectures and scales, as well as benchmarking against existing detection methods. Building on these analyses, we further enable a semi-automatic detection-in-the-loop framework that continuously updates XFacta with new content to maintain its contemporary relevance. Our analysis provides valuable insights and practices for advancing the field of multimodal misinformation detection. The code and data have been released.
Thematic and Task-Based Categorization of K-12 GenAI Usages with Hierarchical Topic Modeling
Schneider, Johannes, Hasler, Bรฉatrice S., Varrone, Michaela, Hoya, Fabian, Schroffenegger, Thomas, Mah, Dana-Kristin, Pebรถck, Karl
We analyze anonymous interaction data of minors in class-rooms spanning several months, schools, and subjects employing a novel, simple topic modeling approach. Specifically, we categorize more than 17,000 messages generated by students, teachers, and ChatGPT in two dimensions: content (such as nature and people) and tasks (such as writing and explaining). Our hierarchical categorization done separately for each dimension includes exemplary prompts, and provides both a high-level overview as well as tangible insights. Prior works mostly lack a content or thematic categorization. While task categorizations are more prevalent in education, most have not been supported by real-world data for K-12. In turn, it is not surprising that our analysis yielded a number of novel applications. In deriving these insights, we found that many of the well-established classical and emerging computational methods, i.e., topic modeling, for analysis of large amounts of texts underperform, leading us to directly apply state-of-the-art LLMs with adequate pre-processing to achieve hierarchical topic structures with better human alignment through explicit instructions than prior approaches. Our findings support fellow researchers, teachers and students in enriching the usage of GenAI, while our discussion also highlights a number of concerns and open questions for future research.
PRELUDE: A Benchmark Designed to Require Global Comprehension and Reasoning over Long Contexts
Yu, Mo, Chung, Tsz Ting, Zhou, Chulun, Li, Tong, Lu, Rui, Li, Jiangnan, Xu, Liyan, Lu, Haoshu, Zhang, Ning, Li, Jing, Zhou, Jie
We introduce PRELUDE, a benchmark for evaluating long-context understanding through the task of determining whether a character's prequel story is consistent with the canonical narrative of the original book. Our task poses a stronger demand for global comprehension and deep reasoning than existing benchmarks -- as the prequels are not part of the original story, assessing their plausibility typically requires searching and integrating information that is only indirectly related. Empirically, 88% of instances require evidence from multiple parts of the narrative. Experimental results highlight the challenge of our task: in-context learning, RAG and in-domain training with state-of-the-art LLMs, and commercial DeepResearch services, lag behind humans by >15%. A further human study reveals that models often produce correct answers with flawed reasoning, leading to an over 30% gap in reasoning accuracy compared to humans. These findings underscore the substantial room for improvement in long-context understanding and reasoning.