Is a Picture Worth a Thousand Words? Adaptive Multimodal Fact-Checking with Visual Evidence Necessity

ArXi:2604.04692v1 Announce Type: cross Automated fact-checking is a crucial task not only in journalism but also across web platforms, where it s a responsible information ecosystem and mitigates the harms of misinformation. While recent research has progressed from text-only to multimodal fact-checking, a prevailing assumption is that incorporating visual evidence universally improves performance. In this work, we challenge this assumption and show that indiscriminate use of multimodal evidence can reduce accuracy.