Artificial Text Boundary Detection with Topological Data Analysis and Sliding Window Techniques

Due to the rapid development of text generation models, people increasingly often encounter texts that may start out as written by a human but then continue as machine-generated results of large language models. Detecting the boundary between human-written and machine-generated parts of such texts is a very challenging problem that has not received much attention in literature. In this work, we consider and compare a number of different approaches for this artificial text boundary detection problem, comparing several predictors over features of different nature. We show that supervised fine-tuning of the RoBERTa model works well for this task in general but fails to generalize in important cross-domain and cross-generator settings, demonstrating a tendency to overfit to spurious properties of the data. Then, we propose novel approaches based on features extracted from a frozen language model's embeddings that are able to outperform both the human accuracy level and previously considered baselines on the Real or Fake Text benchmark. Moreover, we adapt perplexity-based approaches for the boundary detection task and analyze their behaviour. We analyze the robustness of all proposed classifiers in cross-domain and cross-model settings, discovering important properties of the data that can negatively influence the performance of artificial text boundary detection algorithms.

Intrinsic Dimension Estimation for Robust Detection of AI-Generated Texts

Rapidly increasing quality of AI-generated content makes it difficult to distinguish between human and AI-generated texts, which may lead to undesirable consequences for society. Therefore, it becomes increasingly important to study the properties of human texts that are invariant over text domains and various proficiency of human writers, can be easily calculated for any language, and can robustly separate natural and AI-generated texts regardless of the generation model and sampling method. In this work, we propose such an invariant of human texts, namely the intrinsic dimensionality of the manifold underlying the set of embeddings of a given text sample. We show that the average intrinsic dimensionality of fluent texts in natural language is hovering around the value $9$ for several alphabet-based languages and around $7$ for Chinese, while the average intrinsic dimensionality of AI-generated texts for each language is $\approx 1.5$ lower, with a clear statistical separation between human-generated and AI-generated distributions. This property allows us to build a score-based artificial text detector. The proposed detector's accuracy is stable over text domains, generator models, and human writer proficiency levels, outperforming SOTA detectors in model-agnostic and cross-domain scenarios by a significant margin.

Topological Data Analysis for Speech Processing

We apply topological data analysis (TDA) to speech classification problems and to the introspection of a pretrained speech model, HuBERT. To this end, we introduce a number of topological and algebraic features derived from Transformer attention maps and embeddings. We show that a simple linear classifier built on top of such features outperforms a fine-tuned classification head. In particular, we achieve an improvement of about $9\%$ accuracy and $5\%$ ERR on four common datasets; on CREMA-D, the proposed feature set reaches a new state of the art performance with accuracy $80.155$. We also show that topological features are able to reveal functional roles of speech Transformer heads; e.g., we find the heads capable to distinguish between pairs of sample sources (natural/synthetic) or voices without any downstream fine-tuning. Our results demonstrate that TDA is a promising new approach for speech analysis, especially for tasks that require structural prediction. Appendices, an introduction to TDA, and other additional materials are available here - https://topohubert.github.io/speech-topology-webpages/

Betti numbers of attention graphs is all you really need

We apply methods of topological analysis to the attention graphs, calculated on the attention heads of the BERT model ( arXiv:1810.04805v2 ). Our research shows that the classifier built upon basic persistent topological features (namely, Betti numbers) of the trained neural network can achieve classification results on par with the conventional classification method. We show the relevance of such topological text representation on three text classification benchmarks. For the best of our knowledge, it is the first attempt to analyze the topology of an attention-based neural network, widely used for Natural Language Processing.

Acceptability Judgements via Examining the Topology of Attention Maps

The role of the attention mechanism in encoding linguistic knowledge has received special interest in NLP. However, the ability of the attention heads to judge the grammatical acceptability of a sentence has been underexplored. This paper approaches the paradigm of acceptability judgments with topological data analysis (TDA), showing that the geometric properties of the attention graph can be efficiently exploited for two standard practices in linguistics: binary judgments and linguistic minimal pairs. Topological features enhance the BERT-based acceptability classifier scores by $8$%-$24$% on CoLA in three languages (English, Italian, and Swedish). By revealing the topological discrepancy between attention maps of minimal pairs, we achieve the human-level performance on the BLiMP benchmark, outperforming nine statistical and Transformer LM baselines. At the same time, TDA provides the foundation for analyzing the linguistic functions of attention heads and interpreting the correspondence between the graph features and grammatical phenomena.

Artificial Text Detection via Examining the Topology of Attention Maps

The impressive capabilities of recent generative models to create texts that are challenging to distinguish from the human-written ones can be misused for generating fake news, product reviews, and even abusive content. Despite the prominent performance of existing methods for artificial text detection, they still lack interpretability and robustness towards unseen models. To this end, we propose three novel types of interpretable topological features for this task based on Topological Data Analysis (TDA) which is currently understudied in the field of NLP. We empirically show that the features derived from the BERT model outperform count- and neural-based baselines up to 10\% on three common datasets, and tend to be the most robust towards unseen GPT-style generation models as opposed to existing methods. The probing analysis of the features reveals their sensitivity to the surface and syntactic properties. The results demonstrate that TDA is a promising line with respect to NLP tasks, specifically the ones that incorporate surface and structural information.

Category-Learning with Context-Augmented Autoencoder

Finding an interpretable non-redundant representation of real-world data is one of the key problems in Machine Learning. Biological neural networks are known to solve this problem quite well in unsupervised manner, yet unsupervised artificial neural networks either struggle to do it or require fine tuning for each task individually. We associate this with the fact that a biological brain learns in the context of the relationships between observations, while an artificial network does not. We also notice that, though a naive data augmentation technique can be very useful for supervised learning problems, autoencoders typically fail to generalize transformations from data augmentations. Thus, we believe that providing additional knowledge about relationships between data samples will improve model's capability of finding useful inner data representation. More formally, we consider a dataset not as a manifold, but as a category, where the examples are objects. Two these objects are connected by a morphism, if they actually represent different transformations of the same entity. Following this formalism, we propose a novel method of using data augmentations when training autoencoders. We train a Variational Autoencoder in such a way, that it makes transformation outcome predictable by auxiliary network in terms of the hidden representation. We believe that the classification accuracy of a linear classifier on the learned representation is a good metric to measure its interpretability. In our experiments, present approach outperforms $\beta$-VAE and is comparable with Gaussian-mixture VAE.