Detecting fake news in large datasets is challenging due to its diversity and complexity, with traditional approaches often focusing on textual features while underutilizing semantic and emotional elements. Current methods also rely heavily on large annotated datasets, limiting their effectiveness in more nuanced analysis. To address these challenges, this paper introduces Emotion-\textbf{A}ware \textbf{M}ultimodal Fusion \textbf{P}rompt \textbf{L}\textbf{E}arning (\textbf{AMPLE}) framework to address the above issue by combining text sentiment analysis with multimodal data and hybrid prompt templates. This framework extracts emotional elements from texts by leveraging sentiment analysis tools. It then employs Multi-Head Cross-Attention (MCA) mechanisms and similarity-aware fusion methods to integrate multimodal data. The proposed AMPLE framework demonstrates strong performance on two public datasets in both few-shot and data-rich settings, with results indicating the potential of emotional aspects in fake news detection. Furthermore, the study explores the impact of integrating large language models with this method for text sentiment extraction, revealing substantial room for further improvement. The code can be found at :\url{https://github.com/xxm1215/MMM2025_few-shot/

Real-world applications of large language models (LLMs) in computational social science (CSS) tasks primarily depend on the effectiveness of instruction tuning (IT) or in-context learning (ICL). While IT has shown highly effective at fine-tuning LLMs for various tasks, ICL offers a rapid alternative for task adaptation by learning from examples without explicit gradient updates. In this paper, we evaluate the classification performance of LLMs using IT versus ICL in few-shot CSS tasks. The experimental results indicate that ICL consistently outperforms IT in most CSS tasks. Additionally, we investigate the relationship between the increasing number of training samples and LLM performance. Our findings show that simply increasing the number of samples without considering their quality does not consistently enhance the performance of LLMs with either ICL or IT and can sometimes even result in a performance decline. Finally, we compare three prompting strategies, demonstrating that ICL is more effective than zero-shot and Chain-of-Thought (CoT). Our research highlights the significant advantages of ICL in handling CSS tasks in few-shot settings and emphasizes the importance of optimizing sample quality and prompting strategies to improve LLM classification performance. The code will be made available.

The nascent topic of fake news requires automatic detection methods to quickly learn from limited annotated samples. Therefore, the capacity to rapidly acquire proficiency in a new task with limited guidance, also known as few-shot learning, is critical for detecting fake news in its early stages. Existing approaches either involve fine-tuning pre-trained language models which come with a large number of parameters, or training a complex neural network from scratch with large-scale annotated datasets. This paper presents a multimodal fake news detection model which augments multimodal features using unimodal features. For this purpose, we introduce Cross-Modal Augmentation (CMA), a simple approach for enhancing few-shot multimodal fake news detection by transforming n-shot classification into a more robust (n $\times$ z)-shot problem, where z represents the number of supplementary features. The proposed CMA achieves SOTA results over three benchmark datasets, utilizing a surprisingly simple linear probing method to classify multimodal fake news with only a few training samples. Furthermore, our method is significantly more lightweight than prior approaches, particularly in terms of the number of trainable parameters and epoch times. The code is available here: \url{https://github.com/zgjiangtoby/FND_fewshot}