A Comparative Analysis of Transformer Models in Social Bot Detection

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Veit, Rohan, Lones, Michael
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866908545799159808
author Veit, Rohan
Lones, Michael
author_facet Veit, Rohan
Lones, Michael
contents Social media has become a key medium of communication in today's society. This realisation has led to many parties employing artificial users (or bots) to mislead others into believing untruths or acting in a beneficial manner to such parties. Sophisticated text generation tools, such as large language models, have further exacerbated this issue. This paper aims to compare the effectiveness of bot detection models based on encoder and decoder transformers. Pipelines are developed to evaluate the performance of these classifiers, revealing that encoder-based classifiers demonstrate greater accuracy and robustness. However, decoder-based models showed greater adaptability through task-specific alignment, suggesting more potential for generalisation across different use cases in addition to superior observa. These findings contribute to the ongoing effort to prevent digital environments being manipulated while protecting the integrity of online discussion.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_14936
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Comparative Analysis of Transformer Models in Social Bot Detection
Veit, Rohan
Lones, Michael
Machine Learning
Social media has become a key medium of communication in today's society. This realisation has led to many parties employing artificial users (or bots) to mislead others into believing untruths or acting in a beneficial manner to such parties. Sophisticated text generation tools, such as large language models, have further exacerbated this issue. This paper aims to compare the effectiveness of bot detection models based on encoder and decoder transformers. Pipelines are developed to evaluate the performance of these classifiers, revealing that encoder-based classifiers demonstrate greater accuracy and robustness. However, decoder-based models showed greater adaptability through task-specific alignment, suggesting more potential for generalisation across different use cases in addition to superior observa. These findings contribute to the ongoing effort to prevent digital environments being manipulated while protecting the integrity of online discussion.
title A Comparative Analysis of Transformer Models in Social Bot Detection
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14936