Rumor Detection on Social Media with Hierarchical Adversarial Training

Ni, Shiwen; Li, Jiawen; Kao, Hung-Yu

The proliferation of rumors on social media has a huge impact on society. However, natural language text is high-dimensional and sparse, and the same rumor may be expressed in hundreds of ways on social media. As such, the robustness and generalization of the current rumor detection model are put into question. We propose a new hierarchical model called HAT-RD, which is divided into two categories: post-level modules and event-level modules. HAT-RD adopts a novel hierarchical adversarial training method based on gradient ascent by adding adversarial perturbations to the embedding layers both of post-level modules and event-level modules to deceive the detector. At the same time, the detector uses stochastic gradient descent to minimize the adversarial risk to learn a more robust model. In this way, the post-level and event-level sample spaces are enhanced, and experiments indicate that the model drift into an area with a flat loss landscape that leads to better generalization. Experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate that our model achieves better results than state-of-the-art methods.