arXiv Computation and Language

Authorship identification under domain shift: a survey of stylistic measures and learned author representations

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 2

Evaluating Style-Personalized Text Generation: Challenges and Directions

The paper "Evaluating Style-Personalized Text Generation: Challenges and Directions" examines the difficulties of assessing text that is tailored to individual users’ styles. It critiques common metrics such as BLEU, embeddings, and LLM-as-judges, and introduces a style discrimination benchmark covering domain discrimination, authorship attribution, and LLM-generated personalized versus non-personalized discrimination across eight writing tasks. The study finds that ensembles of diverse evaluation metrics outperform single-evaluator approaches and offers guidance for reliable assessment of style-personalized generation.

By Anubhav Jangra, Bahareh Sarrafzadeh, Silviu Cucerzan, Adrian de Wynter, Sujay Kumar Jauhar
arXiv AI
Aug 28

Style as a Confound: False Positives in AI Detection of Non-Native Academic Writing

The study examines how professional English editing influences AI text detectors’ false-positive rates for non-native academic writing. Using 135,389 pairs of original and edited manuscripts, researchers found that detector responses varied widely—some editors increased AI scores while others decreased them—and that score changes correlated with the extent of editing. These results highlight professional editing style as a key confounding factor in AI detection, complicating the distinction between AI authorship and linguistic style.

By Hyeonchu Park, Gahye Jeong, Bugeun Kim
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 AI
Sep 2

Value Over Language Model: Detecting Original Contribution in Writing

The paper introduces VOLM, a framework that quantifies how much original value a human adds to a document beyond what a language model could generate from a task description alone. Unlike existing tools that focus on stylistic detection, VOLM extracts content at varying granularities, reconstructs it with an LLM, and compares these reconstructions to those derived from the task description. Evaluations across news articles, ICLR peer reviews, and argumentative essays show that VOLM can distinguish human-authored texts from LLM-generated ones while remaining robust to content-preserving transformations.

By Vibhhu Sharma, Thorsten Joachims, Sarah Dean
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 AI
Sep 17

AuthorMix: Modular Authorship Style Transfer via Layer-wise Adapter Mixing

AuthorMix is a lightweight, modular framework for authorship style transfer that uses layer‑wise adapter mixing. It trains individual style‑specific LoRA adapters on a small set of high‑resource authors, enabling rapid adaptation to new target styles with only a few examples. The method achieves the highest combined style‑meaning score among baselines, including GPT‑5.1, and improves meaning preservation, as confirmed by human evaluation.

By Sarubi Thillainathan, Ji-Ung Lee, Michael Sullivan, Alexander Koller