Team Yao at Factify 2022: Utilizing Pre-trained Models and Co-attention Networks for Multi-Modal Fact Verification

In recent years, social media has enabled users to get exposed to a myriad of misinformation and disinformation; thus, misinformation has attracted a great deal of attention in research fields and as a social issue. To address the problem, we propose a framework, Pre-CoFact, composed of two pre-trained models for extracting features from text and images, and multiple co-attention networks for fusing the same modality but different sources and different modalities. Besides, we adopt the ensemble method by using different pre-trained models in Pre-CoFact to achieve better performance. We further illustrate the effectiveness from the ablation study and examine different pre-trained models for comparison. Our team, Yao, won the fifth prize (F1-score: 74.585%) in the Factify challenge hosted by De-Factify @ AAAI 2022, which demonstrates that our model achieved competitive performance without using auxiliary tasks or extra information. The source code of our work is publicly available.