Current multimodal fake news detectors predominantly function as opaque classifiers, offering limited deductive transparency and little insight into how conflicting evidence is reconciled. To address this limitation, we propose Dialectical Structured Reasoning (DSR), a framework modeling fake news detection as an explicit dialectical process over multimodal social context. DSR instantiates two opposing agents: a Verifier, which constructs evidence paths supporting semantic consistency, and a Debunker, which actively explores exposing logical or factual contradictions. Then a differentiable Judge agent adjudicates between these competing perspectives by integrating local evidence with global parametric knowledge. Experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate that DSR achieves state-of-the-art performance while producing transparent, dialectically grounded explanations that closely mirror human reasoning process.

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has improved LLM reasoning, but models often generate explanations that appear coherent while containing unfaithful intermediate steps. Existing self-evaluation approaches are prone to inherent biases: the model may confidently endorse coherence even when the step-to-step implication is not valid, leading to unreliable faithfulness evaluation. We propose FACT-E, a causality-inspired framework for evaluating CoT quality. FACT-E uses controlled perturbations as an instrumental signal to separate genuine step-to-step dependence from bias-driven artifacts, producing more reliable faithfulness estimates (intra-chain faithfulness). To select trustworthy trajectories, FACT-E jointly considers intra-chain faithfulness and CoT-to-answer consistency, ensuring that selected chains are both faithful internally and supportive of the correct final answer. Experiments on GSM8K, MATH, and CommonsenseQA show that FACT-E improves reasoning-trajectory selection and yields stronger in-context learning exemplars. FACT-E also reliably detects flawed reasoning under noisy conditions, providing a robust metric for trustworthy LLM reasoning.

The prevalence of fake news on social media calls for automated fact-checking systems that deliver not only accurate verdicts but also faithful explanations. However, existing large language model (LLM)-based methods often overlook deceptive misinformation styles in generated explanations, producing unfaithful rationales that may mislead human judgment. They also rely heavily on external knowledge sources, which can introduce hallucinations and incur substantial latency, undermining both reliability and responsiveness in real-time settings. To address these limitations, we propose REason-guided Fact-checking with Latent EXplanations (REFLEX), a self-refining framework that explicitly controls reasoning style by anchoring explanations to the predicted verdict. REFLEX leverages self-disagreement veracity signals between a backbone model and its fine-tuned variant to construct steering vectors, thereby naturally disentangling factual content from stylistic cues. Experiments on a real-world benchmark show that REFLEX achieves state-of-the-art performance under LLaMA-series models using only 465 self-refined samples. Owing to its transferability, REFLEX also yields gains of up to 7.54 Macro-F1 points on in-the-wild data. Further analysis shows that our method effectively mitigates faithful hallucination, leading to both more reliable explanations and more accurate verdicts than prior explainable fact-checking approaches.

Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit knowledge disparities across languages. Encouraging LLMs to abstain when faced with knowledge gaps is a promising strategy to reduce hallucinations in multilingual settings. Current abstention strategies for multilingual scenarios primarily rely on generating feedback in various languages using LLMs and performing self-reflection. However, these methods can be adversely impacted by inaccuracies and biases in the generated feedback. To address this, from a causal perspective, we introduce CausalAbstain, a method that helps LLMs determine whether to utilize multiple generated feedback responses and how to identify the most useful ones. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CausalAbstain effectively selects helpful feedback and enhances abstention decisions with interpretability in both native language (Casual-native) and multilingual (Causal-multi) settings, outperforming strong baselines on two benchmark datasets covering encyclopedic and commonsense knowledge QA tasks.

Due to the auto-regressive nature of current video large language models (Video-LLMs), the inference latency increases as the input sequence length grows, posing challenges for the efficient processing of video sequences that are usually very long. We observe that during decoding, the attention scores of most tokens in Video-LLMs tend to be sparse and concentrated, with only certain tokens requiring comprehensive full attention. Based on this insight, we introduce Sparse-to-Dense (StD), a novel decoding strategy that integrates two distinct modules: one leveraging sparse top-K attention and the other employing dense full attention. These modules collaborate to accelerate Video-LLMs without loss. The fast (sparse) model speculatively decodes multiple tokens, while the slow (dense) model verifies them in parallel. StD is a tuning-free, plug-and-play solution that achieves up to a 1.94 walltime speedup in video processing. It maintains model performance while enabling a seamless transition from a standard Video-LLM to a sparse Video-LLM with minimal code modifications.