Knowledge-Enhanced Multimodal Fake News Detection: Semantic Visual and Priority Fusion

Multimodal fake information increasingly threatens the Web ecosystem's trustworthiness and security, making improving detection accuracy a critical scientific challenge. The limited information interaction in traditional multimodal fake news detection methods fails to leverage semantic knowledge to model complex cross-modal forgery patterns and global structural anomalies, restricting the model's capability. To address the issues, this paper proposes a multimodal fake news detection method, SVPF-Net, that centers on semantic-driven visual enhancement and knowledge-aided modality-priority fusion. For visual representation optimization, we design a dual-feature extraction module and a dual-fusion enhancement module. A weighted fusion strategy is employed to construct a structured visual representation that integrates the semantics of local forgeries and global anomalies. Meanwhile, a cross-attention mechanism enables bidirectional alignment and interactive coupling between local and global image features, thereby achieving effective complementarity between local forgery cues and global anomaly patterns. For multimodal fusion, high-quality textual semantic features and visual representations are integrated via a modality-priority progressive fusion strategy that relies on cross-attention. The integration enables robust cross-modal semantic interaction and effectively enhances the efficiency of multimodal feature fusion. Comprehensive experiments validate the optimal performance of SVPF-Net and its ability to enhance interpretable semantics, providing valuable support for the practical application of reliable fake news detection.