When Evidence Falls Short: Router-Guided Fake News Detection with Pattern Augmentation

Abstract

With the growing complexity of online information, trustworthy fake news detection has become increasingly critical. Although Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit a strong ability to leverage factual evidence for verification, they remain highly vulnerable to unreliable, noisy, or scarce evidence, undermining robustness in real-world scenarios. Given the generalizability of deceptive patterns in fake news, we consider pattern as a complementary signal under insufficient evidence during factual verification. However, due to LLMs' lack of expertise in deception-specific patterns, realizing such effective collaboration remains challenging. To address these issues, we propose a Router-Guided Fake News Detection Framework with Pattern Augmentation (RGPA). Specifically, we introduce a hierarchical routing mechanism including a case router and an external evidence router. It guides news to appropriate reasoning paths adaptively based on a multi-dimensional quality assessment, prioritizing high-quality evidence while mitigating noise. Furthermore, we design an expert model to capture deceptive features and integrate them into LLMs' reasoning, enabling a synergy of factual verification and pattern awareness under evidence-scarce scenarios. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate that RGPA significantly outperforms existing approaches.