Fanxiao Li
Author directory2026
Better with Experience: Self-Evolving LLM Agents for Evidence-Grounded Health Community Notes
Zihang Fu | Fanxiao Li | Jianyang Gu | Haonan Wang | Preslav Nakov | Bryan Hooi | Min-Yen Kan | Jiaying Wu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Zihang Fu | Fanxiao Li | Jianyang Gu | Haonan Wang | Preslav Nakov | Bryan Hooi | Min-Yen Kan | Jiaying Wu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Large Language Model (LLM)-augmented Community Notes offer a scalable path for timely, evidence-grounded correction of health misinformation on social platforms. However, they still reset at every post, leaving useful correction experience from prior cases unused. We introduce EvoNote, an agentic framework that enables health Community Notes generation to self-evolve through an evolving experience memory of prior misinformation correction episodes. Its core is fine-grained credit assignment: EvoNote grounds trajectory-level feedback in health-specific note qualities and distills it into action-level memory for claim analysis, evidence acquisition, and note writing. We evaluate EvoNote on MM-HealthCN, a 1.2K-instance multimodal benchmark of user-flagged health posts with human-written Community Notes and crowd-derived helpfulness labels. Under a human-validated hierarchical utility judge, EvoNote-generated notes are preferred over corresponding human-written notes in 89.6% of cases; on a separate set of Needs More Ratings posts without a crowd helpfulness verdict, EvoNote produces helpful notes for 82.0% of cases. It also reduces time to an available candidate correction from multi-hour post-to-note delays to under 2 minutes on average. Analyses link these quality gains to stronger evidence use and reusable correction strategies, positioning self-evolving note generation as a promising paradigm for scalable health misinformation governance.
The Facade of Truth: Uncovering and Mitigating LLM Susceptibility to Deceptive Evidence
Herun Wan | Jiaying Wu | Minnan Luo | Fanxiao Li | Zhi Zeng | Min-Yen Kan
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Herun Wan | Jiaying Wu | Minnan Luo | Fanxiao Li | Zhi Zeng | Min-Yen Kan
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
To reliably assist human decision-making, LLMs must maintain factual internal beliefs against misleading injections. While current models resist explicit misinformation, we uncover a fundamental vulnerability to sophisticated, hard-to-falsify evidence. To systematically probe this weakness, we introduce MisBelief, a framework that generates misleading evidence via collaborative, multi-round interactions among multi-role LLMs. This process mimics subtle, defeasible reasoning and progressive refinement to create logically persuasive yet factually deceptive claims. Using MisBelief, we generate 4,800 instances across three difficulty levels to evaluate 7 representative LLMs. Results indicate that while models are robust to direct misinformation, they are highly sensitive to this refined evidence: belief scores in falsehoods increase by an average of 93.0%, fundamentally compromising downstream recommendations. To address this, we propose Deceptive Intent Shielding (DIS), a governance mechanism that provides an early warning signal by inferring the deceptive intent behind evidence. Empirical results demonstrate that DIS consistently mitigates belief shifts and promotes more cautious evidence evaluation.
Correct When Paired, Wrong When Split: Decoupling and Editing Modality-Specific Neurons in MLLMs
Tingchao Fu | Wenkai Wang | Fanxiao Li | Huadong Zhang | Jinhong Zhang | Dayang Li | Yunyun Dong | Renyang Liu | Wei Zhou
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Tingchao Fu | Wenkai Wang | Fanxiao Li | Huadong Zhang | Jinhong Zhang | Dayang Li | Yunyun Dong | Renyang Liu | Wei Zhou
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Although Knowledge Editing provides an efficient mechanism for updating the knowledge of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), we find that current paradigms still suffer from an important yet remain underexplored issue : editing decoupling failure, where entity-related knowledge can be updated when the model is triggered by multimodal inputs (text–image query pairs), however, it often reverts to outdated pre-edit facts when the paired inputs are split into unimodal ones. Our in-depth empirical analysis reveals that the entity knowledge in MLLMs is not stored as a unified representation, but is instead distributed across disentangled modality-specific pathways. As a result, updates biased toward multimodal queries fail to propagate effectively to unimodal circuits. To bridge this gap, we propose DECODE, which explicitly disentangles and localizes modality-specific neuron groups for targeted knowledge. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DECODE consistently achieves effective knowledge updates under different modality triggers, thereby mitigating editing decoupling failures.
What’s Left Unsaid? Detecting and Correcting Misleading Omissions in Multimodal News Previews
Fanxiao Li | Jiaying Wu | Tingchao Fu | Dayang Li | Herun Wan | Wei Zhou | Min-Yen Kan
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Fanxiao Li | Jiaying Wu | Tingchao Fu | Dayang Li | Herun Wan | Wei Zhou | Min-Yen Kan
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Even when factually correct, social-media news previews (image-headline pairs) can induce interpretation drift: by selectively omitting crucial context, they lead readers to form judgments that diverge from what the full article supports. This covert harm is subtler than explicit misinformation, yet remains underexplored. To address this gap, we develop a multi-stage pipeline that simulates preview-based and context-based understanding, enabling construction of the MM-Misleading benchmark. Using MM-Misleading, we systematically evaluate open-source LVLMs and uncover pronounced blind spots in omission-based misleadingness detection. We further propose OMGuard, which combines (1) Interpretation-Aware Fine-Tuning for misleadingness detection and (2) Rationale-Guided Misleading Content Correction, where explicit rationales guide headline rewriting to reduce misleading impressions. Experiments show that OMGuard lifts an 8B model’s detection accuracy to the level of a 235B LVLM while delivering markedly stronger end-to-end correction. Further analysis shows that misleadingness usually arises from local narrative shifts, such as missing background, instead of global frame changes, and identifies image-driven cases where text-only correction fails, underscoring the need for visual interventions.
Beyond the Crowd: LLM-Augmented Community Notes for Governing Health Misinformation
Jiaying Wu | Zihang Fu | Haonan Wang | Fanxiao Li | Jiafeng Guo | Preslav Nakov | Min-Yen Kan
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Jiaying Wu | Zihang Fu | Haonan Wang | Fanxiao Li | Jiafeng Guo | Preslav Nakov | Min-Yen Kan
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Community Notes, the crowd-sourced misinformation governance system on X (formerly Twitter), allows users to flag misleading posts, attach contextual notes, and rate the notes’ helpfulness. However, our empirical analysis of 30.8K health-related notes reveals substantial latency, with a median delay of 17.6 hours before notes receive a helpfulness status. To improve responsiveness during real-world misinformation surges, we propose CrowdNotes+, a unified LLM-based framework that augments Community Notes for faster and more reliable health misinformation governance. CrowdNotes+ integrates two modes: (1) evidence-grounded note augmentation and (2) utility-guided note automation, supported by a hierarchical three-stage evaluation of relevance, correctness, and helpfulness. We instantiate the framework with HealthNotes, a benchmark of 1.2K health notes annotated for helpfulness, and a fine-tuned helpfulness judge. Our analysis first uncovers a key loophole in current crowd-sourced governance: voters frequently conflate stylistic fluency with factual accuracy. Addressing this via our hierarchical evaluation, experiments across 15 representative LLMs demonstrate that CrowdNotes+ significantly outperforms human contributors in note correctness, helpfulness, and evidence utility.
2025
IMRRF: Integrating Multi-Source Retrieval and Redundancy Filtering for LLM-based Fake News Detection
Dayang Li | Fanxiao Li | Bingbing Song | Li Tang | Wei Zhou
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Dayang Li | Fanxiao Li | Bingbing Song | Li Tang | Wei Zhou
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
The widespread use of social networks has significantly accelerated the dissemination of information but has also facilitated the rapid spread of fake news, leading to various negative consequences. Recently, with the emergence of large language models (LLMs), researchers have focused on leveraging LLMs for automated fake news detection. Unfortunately, many issues remain to be addressed. First, the evidence retrieved to verify given fake news is often insufficient, limiting the performance of LLMs when reasoning directly from this evidence. Additionally, the retrieved evidence frequently contains substantial redundant information, which can interfere with the LLMs’ judgment. To address these limitations, we propose a Multiple Knowledge Sources Retrieval and LLM Knowledge Conversion framework, which enriches the evidence available for claim verification. We also introduce a Redundant Information Filtering Strategy, which minimizes the influence of irrelevant information on the LLM reasoning process. Extensive experiments conducted on two challenging fact-checking datasets demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art fact-checking baselines. Our code is available at https://github.com/quark233/IMRRF/tree/main.
CMIE: Combining MLLM Insights with External Evidence for Explainable Out-of-Context Misinformation Detection
Fanxiao Li | Jiaying Wu | Canyuan He | Wei Zhou
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Fanxiao Li | Jiaying Wu | Canyuan He | Wei Zhou
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in visual reasoning and text generation. While previous studies have explored the application of MLLM for detecting out-of-context (OOC) misinformation, our empirical analysis reveals two persisting challenges of this paradigm. Evaluating the representative GPT-4o model on direct reasoning and evidence augmented reasoning, results indicate that MLLM struggle to capture the deeper relationships—specifically, cases in which the image and text are not directly connected but are associated through underlying semantic links. Moreover, noise in the evidence further impairs detection accuracy.To address these challenges, we propose CMIE, a novel OOC misinformation detection framework that incorporates a Coexistence Relationship Generation (CRG) strategy and an Association Scoring (AS) mechanism. CMIE identifies the underlying coexistence relationships between images and text, and selectively utilizes relevant evidence to enhance misinformation detection. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing methods.