Is a Picture Worth a Thousand Words? Adaptive Multimodal Fact-Checking with Visual Evidence Necessity

Jaeyoon Jung, Yejun Yoon, Kunwoo Park


Abstract
Automated fact-checking is a crucial task that supports a responsible information ecosystem. While recent research has progressed from text-only to multimodal fact-checking, a prevailing assumption is that incorporating visual evidence universally improves verification accuracy. In this work, we challenge this assumption and show that the indiscriminate use of visual evidence can reduce accuracy. Building on this finding, we propose AMuFC, a modular fact-checking framework that employs two collaborative vision-language models with distinct roles to enable the adaptive use of visual evidence. Experimental results on three datasets, including WebFC, introduced in this study, demonstrate the effectiveness of adaptive visual evidence use in fact-checking.
Anthology ID:
2026.aacl-long.166
Volume:
Proceedings of the 15th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 5th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
November
Year:
2026
Address:
Hengqin, China
Editors:
Yue Zhang, Ruifeng Xu, Ayu Purwarianti, Tong Rong, Jun Suzuki
Venues:
AACL | IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3669–3687
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.aacl-long.166/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jaeyoon Jung, Yejun Yoon, and Kunwoo Park. 2026. Is a Picture Worth a Thousand Words? Adaptive Multimodal Fact-Checking with Visual Evidence Necessity. In Proceedings of the 15th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 5th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 3669–3687, Hengqin, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Is a Picture Worth a Thousand Words? Adaptive Multimodal Fact-Checking with Visual Evidence Necessity (Jung et al., AACL-IJCNLP 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.aacl-long.166.pdf