The paradigm shift: A comprehensive survey on large vision language models for multimodal fake news detection

Abstract

In recent years, the rapid evolution of large vision–language models (LVLMs) has driven a paradigm shift in multimodal fake news detection (MFND), transforming it from traditional feature-engineering approaches to unified, end-to-end multimodal reasoning frameworks. Early methods primarily relied on shallow fusion techniques to capture correlations between text and images, but they struggled with high-level semantic understanding and complex cross-modal interactions. The emergence of LVLMs has fundamentally changed this landscape by enabling joint modeling of vision and language with powerful representation learning, thereby enhancing the ability to detect misinformation that leverages both textual narratives and visual content. Despite these advances, the field lacks a systematic survey that traces this transition and consolidates recent developments. To address this gap, this paper provides a comprehensive review of MFND through the lens of LVLMs. We first present a historical perspective, mapping the evolution from conventional multimodal detection pipelines to foundation model-driven paradigms. Next, we establish a structured taxonomy covering model architectures, datasets, and performance benchmarks. Furthermore, we analyze the remaining technical challenges, including interpretability, temporal reasoning, and domain generalization. Finally, we outline future research directions to guide the next stage of this paradigm shift. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive survey to systematically document and analyze the transformative role of LVLMs in combating multimodal fake news. The summary of existing methods mentioned is in our Github: https://github.com/Tan-YiLong/Overview-of-Fake-News-Detection.