arXiv · 2610.17271
Reasoning for Propaganda Detection via Label-Guided CoT Optimisation
Abstract
Propaganda detection systems usually operate as black boxes, lacking explanations. To address this, we hypothesise that persuasive techniques contain definitional characteristics with respect to their social-political setting. We introduce ReCoT, a reasoning-conditioned detection framework that captures definitional cues of persuasive techniques via population-level refinement and performance-guided resampling, without requiring additional explanation annotations. On INDI-PROPspan, ReCoT achieves a macro F1_LCS of 0.364, surpassing baselines and reaching 88% of the SFT upper bound on Avg F1_LCS. Similarly, on PTC, ReCoT reaches 85% of the SFT upper bound on Avg F1_LCS, closing much of this gap while remaining interpretable. Importantly, the analysis of the reasoning pool's convergence and update pattern for ReCoT shows effective refinement of reasoning CoTs.
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Zeba Afroz, Harsh Vardhan, Md. Shad Akhtar. 2026-10-12. Reasoning for Propaganda Detection via Label-Guided CoT Optimisation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.17271
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