What Does the Bot Say? Opportunities and Risks of Large Language Models in Social Media Bot Detection

Fuente: arXiv
Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Feng, Shangbin, Wan, Herun, Wang, Ningnan, Tan, Zhaoxuan, Luo, Minnan, Tsvetkov, Yulia
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
Materias:
Acceso en línea:
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
_version_ 1866914858792910848
author Feng, Shangbin
Wan, Herun
Wang, Ningnan
Tan, Zhaoxuan
Luo, Minnan
Tsvetkov, Yulia
author_facet Feng, Shangbin
Wan, Herun
Wang, Ningnan
Tan, Zhaoxuan
Luo, Minnan
Tsvetkov, Yulia
contents Social media bot detection has always been an arms race between advancements in machine learning bot detectors and adversarial bot strategies to evade detection. In this work, we bring the arms race to the next level by investigating the opportunities and risks of state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) in social bot detection. To investigate the opportunities, we design novel LLM-based bot detectors by proposing a mixture-of-heterogeneous-experts framework to divide and conquer diverse user information modalities. To illuminate the risks, we explore the possibility of LLM-guided manipulation of user textual and structured information to evade detection. Extensive experiments with three LLMs on two datasets demonstrate that instruction tuning on merely 1,000 annotated examples produces specialized LLMs that outperform state-of-the-art baselines by up to 9.1% on both datasets, while LLM-guided manipulation strategies could significantly bring down the performance of existing bot detectors by up to 29.6% and harm the calibration and reliability of bot detection systems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_00371
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle What Does the Bot Say? Opportunities and Risks of Large Language Models in Social Media Bot Detection
Feng, Shangbin
Wan, Herun
Wang, Ningnan
Tan, Zhaoxuan
Luo, Minnan
Tsvetkov, Yulia
Computation and Language
Social media bot detection has always been an arms race between advancements in machine learning bot detectors and adversarial bot strategies to evade detection. In this work, we bring the arms race to the next level by investigating the opportunities and risks of state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) in social bot detection. To investigate the opportunities, we design novel LLM-based bot detectors by proposing a mixture-of-heterogeneous-experts framework to divide and conquer diverse user information modalities. To illuminate the risks, we explore the possibility of LLM-guided manipulation of user textual and structured information to evade detection. Extensive experiments with three LLMs on two datasets demonstrate that instruction tuning on merely 1,000 annotated examples produces specialized LLMs that outperform state-of-the-art baselines by up to 9.1% on both datasets, while LLM-guided manipulation strategies could significantly bring down the performance of existing bot detectors by up to 29.6% and harm the calibration and reliability of bot detection systems.
title What Does the Bot Say? Opportunities and Risks of Large Language Models in Social Media Bot Detection
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.00371