Generative Agents for Multimodal Controversy Detection

Generative Agents for Multimodal Controversy Detection

Tianjiao Xu, Jinfei Gao, Keyi Kong, Jianhua Yin, Tian Gan, Liqiang Nie

Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
AI and Social Good. Pages 9963-9971. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2025/1107

Multimodal controversy detection, which involves determining whether a given video and its associated comments are controversial, plays a pivotal role in risk management on social video platforms. Existing methods typically provide only classification results, failing to identify what aspects are controversial and why, thereby lacking detailed explanations. To address this limitation, we propose a novel Agent-based Multimodal Controversy Detection architecture, termed AgentMCD. This architecture leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) as generative agents to simulate human behavior and improve explainability. AgentMCD employs a multi-aspect reasoning process, where multiple judges conduct evaluations from diverse perspectives to derive a final decision. Furthermore, a multi-agent simulation process is incorporated, wherein agents act as audiences, offering opinions and engaging in free discussions after watching videos. This hybrid framework enables comprehensive controversy evaluation and significantly enhances explainability. Experiments conducted on the MMCD dataset demonstrate that our proposed architecture outperforms existing LLM-based baselines in both high-resource and low-resource comment scenarios, while maintaining superior explainability.
Keywords:
Multidisciplinary Topics and Applications: General
AI Ethics, Trust, Fairness: General
Humans and AI: General
Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: General