GMCL: Graph-Enhanced Multimodal Contrastive Learning for Rumor Detection

Multimedia rumor content has been widely disseminated with the rise of generative technologies. Existing rumor detection approaches typically focus independently on multimodal data (such as text and images) or social structure analysis, and only a few researchers have attempted to integrate all three modalities for comprehensive rumor detection. Due to the complexity of the relationships between these heterogeneous data, combining them effectively remains a challenge. In this work, we present a novel Graph-Enhanced Multimodal Contrastive Learning (GMCL) to integrate textual, visual, and social graph features more efficiently for rumor detection. We utilize semantic correlation to assist cross-modal contrastive learning to capture fine-grained alignment between text and image and enhance node representations through graph contrastive learning without relying on negative samples. By aligning and integrating these different representations, our method can detect rumors more accurately. Extensive experimental results show that our model outperforms current state-of-the-art methods in multimodal rumor detection.