Researcher profile

Juan Cao

Juan Cao contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

14 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Logical Consistency as a Bridge: Improving LLM Hallucination Detection via Label Constraint Modeling between Responses and Self-Judgments

Large Language Models (LLMs) are prone to factual hallucinations, risking their reliability in real-world applications. Existing hallucination detectors mainly extract micro-level intrinsic patterns for uncertainty quantification or elicit macro-level self-judgments through verbalized prompts. However, these methods address only a single facet of the hallucination, focusing either on implicit neural uncertainty or explicit symbolic reasoning, thereby treating these inherently coupled behaviors in isolation and failing to exploit their interdependence for a holistic view. In this paper, we propose LaaB (Logical Consistency-as-a-Bridge), a framework that bridges neural features and symbolic judgments for hallucination detection. LaaB introduces a "meta-judgment" process to map symbolic labels back into the feature space. By leveraging the inherent logical bridge where response and meta-judgment labels are either the same or opposite based on the self-judgment's semantics, LaaB aligns and integrates dual-view signals via mutual learning and enhances the hallucination detection. Extensive experiments on 4 public datasets, across 4 LLMs, against 8 baselines demonstrate the superiority of LaaB.

preprint2022arXiv

A Prompting-based Approach for Adversarial Example Generation and Robustness Enhancement

Recent years have seen the wide application of NLP models in crucial areas such as finance, medical treatment, and news media, raising concerns of the model robustness and vulnerabilities. In this paper, we propose a novel prompt-based adversarial attack to compromise NLP models and robustness enhancement technique. We first construct malicious prompts for each instance and generate adversarial examples via mask-and-filling under the effect of a malicious purpose. Our attack technique targets the inherent vulnerabilities of NLP models, allowing us to generate samples even without interacting with the victim NLP model, as long as it is based on pre-trained language models (PLMs). Furthermore, we design a prompt-based adversarial training method to improve the robustness of PLMs. As our training method does not actually generate adversarial samples, it can be applied to large-scale training sets efficiently. The experimental results show that our attack method can achieve a high attack success rate with more diverse, fluent and natural adversarial examples. In addition, our robustness enhancement method can significantly improve the robustness of models to resist adversarial attacks. Our work indicates that prompting paradigm has great potential in probing some fundamental flaws of PLMs and fine-tuning them for downstream tasks.

preprint2022arXiv

Characterizing Multi-Domain False News and Underlying User Effects on Chinese Weibo

False news that spreads on social media has proliferated over the past years and has led to multi-aspect threats in the real world. While there are studies of false news on specific domains (like politics or health care), little work is found comparing false news across domains. In this article, we investigate false news across nine domains on Weibo, the largest Twitter-like social media platform in China, from 2009 to 2019. The newly collected data comprise 44,728 posts in the nine domains, published by 40,215 users, and reposted over 3.4 million times. Based on the distributions and spreads of the multi-domain dataset, we observe that false news in domains that are close to daily life like health and medicine generated more posts but diffused less effectively than those in other domains like politics, and that political false news had the most effective capacity for diffusion. The widely diffused false news posts on Weibo were associated strongly with certain types of users -- by gender, age, etc. Further, these posts provoked strong emotions in the reposts and diffused further with the active engagement of false-news starters. Our findings have the potential to help design false news detection systems in suspicious news discovery, veracity prediction, and display and explanation. The comparison of the findings on Weibo with those of existing work demonstrates nuanced patterns, suggesting the need for more research on data from diverse platforms, countries, or languages to tackle the global issue of false news. The code and new anonymized dataset are available at https://github.com/ICTMCG/Characterizing-Weibo-Multi-Domain-False-News.

preprint2022arXiv

Combat Data Shift in Few-shot Learning with Knowledge Graph

Many few-shot learning approaches have been designed under the meta-learning framework, which learns from a variety of learning tasks and generalizes to new tasks. These meta-learning approaches achieve the expected performance in the scenario where all samples are drawn from the same distributions (i.i.d. observations). However, in real-world applications, few-shot learning paradigm often suffers from data shift, i.e., samples in different tasks, even in the same task, could be drawn from various data distributions. Most existing few-shot learning approaches are not designed with the consideration of data shift, and thus show downgraded performance when data distribution shifts. However, it is non-trivial to address the data shift problem in few-shot learning, due to the limited number of labeled samples in each task. Targeting at addressing this problem, we propose a novel metric-based meta-learning framework to extract task-specific representations and task-shared representations with the help of knowledge graph. The data shift within/between tasks can thus be combated by the combination of task-shared and task-specific representations. The proposed model is evaluated on popular benchmarks and two constructed new challenging datasets. The evaluation results demonstrate its remarkable performance.

preprint2022arXiv

Deepfake Network Architecture Attribution

With the rapid progress of generation technology, it has become necessary to attribute the origin of fake images. Existing works on fake image attribution perform multi-class classification on several Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) models and obtain high accuracies. While encouraging, these works are restricted to model-level attribution, only capable of handling images generated by seen models with a specific seed, loss and dataset, which is limited in real-world scenarios when fake images may be generated by privately trained models. This motivates us to ask whether it is possible to attribute fake images to the source models' architectures even if they are finetuned or retrained under different configurations. In this work, we present the first study on Deepfake Network Architecture Attribution to attribute fake images on architecture-level. Based on an observation that GAN architecture is likely to leave globally consistent fingerprints while traces left by model weights vary in different regions, we provide a simple yet effective solution named DNA-Det for this problem. Extensive experiments on multiple cross-test setups and a large-scale dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of DNA-Det.

preprint2022arXiv

Delving into the Frequency: Temporally Consistent Human Motion Transfer in the Fourier Space

Human motion transfer refers to synthesizing photo-realistic and temporally coherent videos that enable one person to imitate the motion of others. However, current synthetic videos suffer from the temporal inconsistency in sequential frames that significantly degrades the video quality, yet is far from solved by existing methods in the pixel domain. Recently, some works on DeepFake detection try to distinguish the natural and synthetic images in the frequency domain because of the frequency insufficiency of image synthesizing methods. Nonetheless, there is no work to study the temporal inconsistency of synthetic videos from the aspects of the frequency-domain gap between natural and synthetic videos. In this paper, we propose to delve into the frequency space for temporally consistent human motion transfer. First of all, we make the first comprehensive analysis of natural and synthetic videos in the frequency domain to reveal the frequency gap in both the spatial dimension of individual frames and the temporal dimension of the video. To close the frequency gap between the natural and synthetic videos, we propose a novel Frequency-based human MOtion TRansfer framework, named FreMOTR, which can effectively mitigate the spatial artifacts and the temporal inconsistency of the synthesized videos. FreMOTR explores two novel frequency-based regularization modules: 1) the Frequency-domain Appearance Regularization (FAR) to improve the appearance of the person in individual frames and 2) Temporal Frequency Regularization (TFR) to guarantee the temporal consistency between adjacent frames. Finally, comprehensive experiments demonstrate that the FreMOTR not only yields superior performance in temporal consistency metrics but also improves the frame-level visual quality of synthetic videos. In particular, the temporal consistency metrics are improved by nearly 30% than the state-of-the-art model.

preprint2022arXiv

DRAG: Dynamic Region-Aware GCN for Privacy-Leaking Image Detection

The daily practice of sharing images on social media raises a severe issue about privacy leakage. To address the issue, privacy-leaking image detection is studied recently, with the goal to automatically identify images that may leak privacy. Recent advance on this task benefits from focusing on crucial objects via pretrained object detectors and modeling their correlation. However, these methods have two limitations: 1) they neglect other important elements like scenes, textures, and objects beyond the capacity of pretrained object detectors; 2) the correlation among objects is fixed, but a fixed correlation is not appropriate for all the images. To overcome the limitations, we propose the Dynamic Region-Aware Graph Convolutional Network (DRAG) that dynamically finds out crucial regions including objects and other important elements, and models their correlation adaptively for each input image. To find out crucial regions, we cluster spatially-correlated feature channels into several region-aware feature maps. Further, we dynamically model the correlation with the self-attention mechanism and explore the interaction among the regions with a graph convolutional network. The DRAG achieved an accuracy of 87% on the largest dataset for privacy-leaking image detection, which is 10 percentage points higher than the state of the art. The further case study demonstrates that it found out crucial regions containing not only objects but other important elements like textures.

preprint2022arXiv

Generalizing to the Future: Mitigating Entity Bias in Fake News Detection

The wide dissemination of fake news is increasingly threatening both individuals and society. Fake news detection aims to train a model on the past news and detect fake news of the future. Though great efforts have been made, existing fake news detection methods overlooked the unintended entity bias in the real-world data, which seriously influences models' generalization ability to future data. For example, 97\% of news pieces in 2010-2017 containing the entity `Donald Trump' are real in our data, but the percentage falls down to merely 33\% in 2018. This would lead the model trained on the former set to hardly generalize to the latter, as it tends to predict news pieces about `Donald Trump' as real for lower training loss. In this paper, we propose an entity debiasing framework (\textbf{ENDEF}) which generalizes fake news detection models to the future data by mitigating entity bias from a cause-effect perspective. Based on the causal graph among entities, news contents, and news veracity, we separately model the contribution of each cause (entities and contents) during training. In the inference stage, we remove the direct effect of the entities to mitigate entity bias. Extensive offline experiments on the English and Chinese datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework can largely improve the performance of base fake news detectors, and online tests verify its superiority in practice. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to explicitly improve the generalization ability of fake news detection models to the future data. The code has been released at https://github.com/ICTMCG/ENDEF-SIGIR2022.

preprint2022arXiv

MDFEND: Multi-domain Fake News Detection

Fake news spread widely on social media in various domains, which lead to real-world threats in many aspects like politics, disasters, and finance. Most existing approaches focus on single-domain fake news detection (SFND), which leads to unsatisfying performance when these methods are applied to multi-domain fake news detection. As an emerging field, multi-domain fake news detection (MFND) is increasingly attracting attention. However, data distributions, such as word frequency and propagation patterns, vary from domain to domain, namely domain shift. Facing the challenge of serious domain shift, existing fake news detection techniques perform poorly for multi-domain scenarios. Therefore, it is demanding to design a specialized model for MFND. In this paper, we first design a benchmark of fake news dataset for MFND with domain label annotated, namely Weibo21, which consists of 4,488 fake news and 4,640 real news from 9 different domains. We further propose an effective Multi-domain Fake News Detection Model (MDFEND) by utilizing a domain gate to aggregate multiple representations extracted by a mixture of experts. The experiments show that MDFEND can significantly improve the performance of multi-domain fake news detection. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/kennqiang/MDFEND-Weibo21.

preprint2022arXiv

Memory-Guided Multi-View Multi-Domain Fake News Detection

The wide spread of fake news is increasingly threatening both individuals and society. Great efforts have been made for automatic fake news detection on a single domain (e.g., politics). However, correlations exist commonly across multiple news domains, and thus it is promising to simultaneously detect fake news of multiple domains. Based on our analysis, we pose two challenges in multi-domain fake news detection: 1) domain shift, caused by the discrepancy among domains in terms of words, emotions, styles, etc. 2) domain labeling incompleteness, stemming from the real-world categorization that only outputs one single domain label, regardless of topic diversity of a news piece. In this paper, we propose a Memory-guided Multi-view Multi-domain Fake News Detection Framework (M$^3$FEND) to address these two challenges. We model news pieces from a multi-view perspective, including semantics, emotion, and style. Specifically, we propose a Domain Memory Bank to enrich domain information which could discover potential domain labels based on seen news pieces and model domain characteristics. Then, with enriched domain information as input, a Domain Adapter could adaptively aggregate discriminative information from multiple views for news in various domains. Extensive offline experiments on English and Chinese datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of M$^3$FEND, and online tests verify its superiority in practice. Our code is available at https://github.com/ICTMCG/M3FEND.

preprint2022arXiv

MVSS-Net: Multi-View Multi-Scale Supervised Networks for Image Manipulation Detection

As manipulating images by copy-move, splicing and/or inpainting may lead to misinterpretation of the visual content, detecting these sorts of manipulations is crucial for media forensics. Given the variety of possible attacks on the content, devising a generic method is nontrivial. Current deep learning based methods are promising when training and test data are well aligned, but perform poorly on independent tests. Moreover, due to the absence of authentic test images, their image-level detection specificity is in doubt. The key question is how to design and train a deep neural network capable of learning generalizable features sensitive to manipulations in novel data, whilst specific to prevent false alarms on the authentic. We propose multi-view feature learning to jointly exploit tampering boundary artifacts and the noise view of the input image. As both clues are meant to be semantic-agnostic, the learned features are thus generalizable. For effectively learning from authentic images, we train with multi-scale (pixel / edge / image) supervision. We term the new network MVSS-Net and its enhanced version MVSS-Net++. Experiments are conducted in both within-dataset and cross-dataset scenarios, showing that MVSS-Net++ performs the best, and exhibits better robustness against JPEG compression, Gaussian blur and screenshot based image re-capturing.

preprint2022arXiv

Quantifying Robustness to Adversarial Word Substitutions

Deep-learning-based NLP models are found to be vulnerable to word substitution perturbations. Before they are widely adopted, the fundamental issues of robustness need to be addressed. Along this line, we propose a formal framework to evaluate word-level robustness. First, to study safe regions for a model, we introduce robustness radius which is the boundary where the model can resist any perturbation. As calculating the maximum robustness radius is computationally hard, we estimate its upper and lower bound. We repurpose attack methods as ways of seeking upper bound and design a pseudo-dynamic programming algorithm for a tighter upper bound. Then verification method is utilized for a lower bound. Further, for evaluating the robustness of regions outside a safe radius, we reexamine robustness from another view: quantification. A robustness metric with a rigorous statistical guarantee is introduced to measure the quantification of adversarial examples, which indicates the model's susceptibility to perturbations outside the safe radius. The metric helps us figure out why state-of-the-art models like BERT can be easily fooled by a few word substitutions, but generalize well in the presence of real-world noises.

preprint2021arXiv

Mining Dual Emotion for Fake News Detection

Emotion plays an important role in detecting fake news online. When leveraging emotional signals, the existing methods focus on exploiting the emotions of news contents that conveyed by the publishers (i.e., publisher emotion). However, fake news often evokes high-arousal or activating emotions of people, so the emotions of news comments aroused in the crowd (i.e., social emotion) should not be ignored. Furthermore, it remains to be explored whether there exists a relationship between publisher emotion and social emotion (i.e., dual emotion), and how the dual emotion appears in fake news. In this paper, we verify that dual emotion is distinctive between fake and real news and propose Dual Emotion Features to represent dual emotion and the relationship between them for fake news detection. Further, we exhibit that our proposed features can be easily plugged into existing fake news detectors as an enhancement. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets (one in English and the others in Chinese) show that our proposed feature set: 1) outperforms the state-of-the-art task-related emotional features; 2) can be well compatible with existing fake news detectors and effectively improve the performance of detecting fake news.

preprint2020arXiv

Integrating Semantic and Structural Information with Graph Convolutional Network for Controversy Detection

Identifying controversial posts on social media is a fundamental task for mining public sentiment, assessing the influence of events, and alleviating the polarized views. However, existing methods fail to 1) effectively incorporate the semantic information from content-related posts; 2) preserve the structural information for reply relationship modeling; 3) properly handle posts from topics dissimilar to those in the training set. To overcome the first two limitations, we propose Topic-Post-Comment Graph Convolutional Network (TPC-GCN), which integrates the information from the graph structure and content of topics, posts, and comments for post-level controversy detection. As to the third limitation, we extend our model to Disentangled TPC-GCN (DTPC-GCN), to disentangle topic-related and topic-unrelated features and then fuse dynamically. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate that our models outperform existing methods. Analysis of the results and cases proves that our models can integrate both semantic and structural information with significant generalizability.