arXiv Machine Learning

Measuring, Localizing, and Reducing the AI-Like Writing Style of Post-Trained LLMs

The paper investigates how post‑training of language models introduces or amplifies an AI‑like writing style and whether this style has a localized internal signature. By comparing human text, base‑model outputs, and aligned‑model outputs with matched human‑source prefixes, the authors find that aligned generations are less similar to human corpora and more easily detected as AI‑like. They propose PASTA, a training‑free method that estimates a post‑training alignment signature from residual contrasts and ablates the corresponding direction during decoding, reducing detection rates across multiple models and detectors while preserving relevance and coherence.

arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

AI Writers Have a Consistent Stylometric Footprint, but AI Editors Do Not

The study demonstrates that text produced by large language models (LLMs) leaves a distinct stylometric footprint—primarily increased entropy and lexical diversity—across multiple models and domains. In contrast, AI editing of human text does not replicate this footprint; edited texts show only modest lexical diversity gains and reduced entropy, with lexical density emerging as the key distinguishing feature. Consequently, stylometric analysis can differentiate AI-generated from AI-edited content, but is less effective at distinguishing either from purely human writing.

By Zhengyang Shan, Yukyung Lee, Sophie Hao
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 18

Sampling Reveals Style: Unsupervised, Training-Free Discovery of Prompt-Conditional Stylistic Axes in LLM Activations

The paper introduces a training‑free method for uncovering prompt‑conditional stylistic axes in large language models (LLMs). By repeatedly sampling completions of a single prompt at high temperature and applying Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to the pooled hidden activations, the authors automatically label the resulting axes using the extreme (pole) generations. Validation against 245 human‑elicited stylistic annotations shows that, for the Qwen‑3.5‑4B‑Instruct model, the top two axes align with human dimensions with 72.8% precision and 43.6% macro‑recall, and 75.6% of validity ratings confirm the axes’ polar generations, while other models exhibit varying degrees of discoverability.

By Ajit Mallavarapu, Ziwei Gu
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 22

Why is AI-generated language so hard to understand?

The paper investigates why AI-generated text has become harder to understand, focusing on psycholinguistic features linked to human processing difficulty such as object relative clauses, long syntactic dependencies, and low-frequency n-grams. Using a new corpus of AI-generated text from diverse domains, the study finds that frontier and near-frontier language models employ these difficult features more frequently than paraphrases from round-trip translation and human writing, including more inanimate subjects with animate verbs, longer dependencies, stacked nouns, and reduced object relatives. The authors hypothesize that AI models prioritize information density for tasks like math, code, and reasoning, diverging from human communication goals, and demonstrate this by fine‑tuning a model with a length penalty, which reduces human‑like linguistic behavior.

By Thomas Hikaru Clark, Matias B. Martin, Kyle Mahowald
arXiv AI
Oct 27

Robust and Fine-Grained Detection of AI Generated Texts

arXiv:2504.11952v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: An ideal detection system for machine generated content is supposed to work well on any generator as many more advanced LLMs come into existe...

By Ram Mohan Rao Kadiyala, Siddartha Pullakhandam, Kanwal Mehreen, Drishti Sharma, Siddhant Gupta, Jebish Purbey, Ashay Srivastava, Subhasya TippaReddy, Arvind Reddy Bobbili, Suraj Telugara Chandrashekhar, Ankan Ghosh, Modabbir Adeeb, Srinadh Vura, Suman Debnath, Hamza Farooq
arXiv AI
Sep 1

IndicDetect: Evaluating Cross-Lingual LLM-Generated Text Detection for Hindi, Telugu, and Tamil

IndicDetect is a benchmark for evaluating AI‑generated text detection in Hindi, Telugu, and Tamil. It pairs curated human‑written texts with LLM‑generated counterparts across multiple domains and generators, testing detectors under domain shift, generator shift, and adversarial perturbation. The study shows that supervised neural detectors fail to generalize to unseen generators and attacks, with Hindi experiencing the greatest degradation, indicating that robustness—not peak accuracy—is the main weakness in Indic language detectors.

By Bhaskar Ganesh Devalla, Junchao Wu, Nilesh Dokuparthi, Greeshma Yaluru, Tatiana Muniz Rodriguez, Lidia S. Chao, Derek F. Wong
arXiv Computation and Language
3d ago

Instruction-Tuned Models Locally Produce More Syntactic Overlap -- But Not More Conditional Reuse -- Than Humans Do

The study examines whether large language models (LLMs) show syntactic convergence with human users by analyzing turn‑adjacent reuse of context‑free grammar (CFG) rules in 1,901 matched positions across sixteen open‑weight Llama and Gemma models. All models exhibited greater CFG‑rule overlap with the preceding human turn than with unrelated primes, especially for lower‑frequency rules, and instruction‑tuned models showed even higher overlap with the actual prime than the human responses they replaced. However, instruction tuning also increased overlap with unrelated primes, reduced the actual‑versus‑random difference, and lowered conditional rule‑reuse odds when controlling for rule‑set size, while consistently producing responses with higher lexical and semantic similarity to the preceding turn.

By Zandi Eberstadt