Multimodal Fact-Checking with Vision Language Models: A Probing Classifier based Solution with Embedding Strategies

Recep Firat Cekinel, Pinar Karagoz, Çağrı Çöltekin


Abstract
This study evaluates the effectiveness of Vision Language Models (VLMs) in representing and utilizing multimodal content for fact-checking. To be more specific, we investigate whether incorporating multimodal content improves performance compared to text-only models and how well VLMs utilize text and image information to enhance misinformation detection. Furthermore we propose a probing classifier based solution using VLMs. Our approach extracts embeddings from the last hidden layer of selected VLMs and inputs them into a neural probing classifier for multi-class veracity classification. Through a series of experiments on two fact-checking datasets, we demonstrate that while multimodality can enhance performance, fusing separate embeddings from text and image encoders yielded superior results compared to using VLM embeddings. Furthermore, the proposed neural classifier significantly outperformed KNN and SVM baselines in leveraging extracted embeddings, highlighting its effectiveness for multimodal fact-checking.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.310
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4622–4633
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.310/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Recep Firat Cekinel, Pinar Karagoz, and Çağrı Çöltekin. 2025. Multimodal Fact-Checking with Vision Language Models: A Probing Classifier based Solution with Embedding Strategies. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 4622–4633, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Multimodal Fact-Checking with Vision Language Models: A Probing Classifier based Solution with Embedding Strategies (Cekinel et al., COLING 2025)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.310.pdf