RW-Post: Auditable Evidence-Grounded Multimodal Fact-Checking in the Wild

arXiv:2605.10357v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal misinformation increasingly leverages visual persuasion, where repurposed or manipulated images strengthen misleading text. We introduce extbf{RW-Post}, a post-aligned extbf{text--image benchmark} for real-world multimodal fact-checking with auditable annotations: each instance links the original social-media post with reasoning traces and explicitly linked evidence items derived from human fact-check articles via an LLM-assisted extraction-and-auditing pipeline. RW-Post supports controlled evaluation across closed-book, evidence-bounded, and open-web regimes, enabling systematic diagnosis of visual grounding and evidence utilization. We provide extbf{AgentFact} as a reference verification baseline and benchmark strong open-source LVLMs under unified protocols. Experiments show substantial headroom: current models struggle with faithful evidence grounding, while evidence-bounded evaluation improves both accuracy and faithfulness. Code and dataset will be released at https://github.com/xudanni0927/AgentFact.

Source: arXiv cs.AI | 2026-05-12