When Seeing Is Not Believing—A Benchmark for Search-Grounded Video Misinformation Detection

Tao Yu, Yujia Yang, Shenghua Chai, Jinshuai Zhang, Haopeng Jin, Hao Wang, Minghui Zhang, Zhongtian Luo, Yuchen Long, Xinlong Chen, Jiabing Yang, Zhaolu Kang, Yuxuan Zhou, Siyi Cao, Yuqing Wu, Peifan Wang, Tianyang Dang, Minghui Guo, Hanyu Wang, Hai Huang, Zhengyu Man, Xingyu Yang, Xinya Sun, Xinming Wang, Hongzhu Yi, Zheqi He, Xi Yang, Yan Huang, Liang Wang


Abstract
Video misinformation increasingly operates at the semantic and evidential level: authentic footage may be selectively edited, temporally reordered, spliced across sources, or augmented with AI-generated content to construct false narratives. Such evidence-dependent manipulations cannot be reliably verified from the input video alone, because the missing, reordered, replaced, or recontextualized evidence lies outside the video itself. We introduce EVID-Bench, a benchmark for search-grounded video misinformation detection, where a system must search the open web for related videos and identify what information is false through cross-video comparison. EVID-Bench comprises 222 videos spanning 9 manipulation types across 3 categories: AI generation, single-source editing, and multi-source editing. All samples are verified to be undetectable by frontier models through visual inspection alone. We evaluate nine frontier multimodal models using a retrieval-augmented verification baseline. The best system achieves only 61.43% point-level accuracy and 43.24% video-level accuracy, with AI-generated manipulations remaining especially difficult. Error analysis reveals recurring challenges: models fixate on irrelevant anchors, misattribute synthetic content to editorial splicing, and terminate search prematurely before fully explaining the manipulation.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-emnlp.763
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
16076–16118
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.763/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Tao Yu, Yujia Yang, Shenghua Chai, Jinshuai Zhang, Haopeng Jin, Hao Wang, Minghui Zhang, Zhongtian Luo, Yuchen Long, Xinlong Chen, Jiabing Yang, Zhaolu Kang, Yuxuan Zhou, Siyi Cao, Yuqing Wu, Peifan Wang, Tianyang Dang, Minghui Guo, Hanyu Wang, Hai Huang, Zhengyu Man, Xingyu Yang, Xinya Sun, Xinming Wang, Hongzhu Yi, Zheqi He, Xi Yang, Yan Huang, and Liang Wang. 2026. When Seeing Is Not Believing—A Benchmark for Search-Grounded Video Misinformation Detection. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026, pages 16076–16118, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
When Seeing Is Not Believing—A Benchmark for Search-Grounded Video Misinformation Detection (Yu et al., Findings 2026)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.763.pdf