Papers › COSMOS: Catching Out-of-Context Misinformation with Self-Supervised Learning

COSMOS: Catching Out-of-Context Misinformation with Self-Supervised Learning

15 Jan 2021arXiv:2101.06278archive 2025-07-28

Shivangi Aneja, Chris Bregler, Matthias Nießner

Despite the recent attention to DeepFakes, one of the most prevalent ways to mislead audiences on social media is the use of unaltered images in a new but false context. To address these challenges and support fact-checkers, we propose a new method that automatically detects out-of-context image and text pairs. Our key insight is to leverage the grounding of image with text to distinguish out-of-context scenarios that cannot be disambiguated with language alone. We propose a self-supervised training strategy where we only need a set of captioned images. At train time, our method learns to selectively align individual objects in an image with textual claims, without explicit supervision. At test time, we check if both captions correspond to the same object(s) in the image but are semantically different, which allows us to make fairly accurate out-of-context predictions. Our method achieves 85% out-of-context detection accuracy. To facilitate benchmarking of this task, we create a large-scale dataset of 200K images with 450K textual captions from a variety of news websites, blogs, and social media posts. The dataset and source code is publicly available at https://shivangi-aneja.github.io/projects/cosmos/.

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

shivangi-aneja/COSMOS officialmentioned on GitHubpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

BenchmarkingMisinformationSelf-Supervised Learning

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections