Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Chen, Shuangyi, Khisti, Ashish
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07500
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866917478599229440
author Chen, Shuangyi
Khisti, Ashish
author_facet Chen, Shuangyi
Khisti, Ashish
contents We study black-box detection of machine-generated text under practical constraints: the scoring model (proxy LM) may mismatch the unknown source model, and per-input contrastive generation is costly. We propose SurpMark, a reference-based detector that summarizes a passage by the dynamics of its token surprisals. SurpMark discretizes surprisals into interpretable states, estimates a state-transition matrix for the test text, and scores it via a generalized Jensen-Shannon (GJS) gap between the test transitions and two fixed references (human vs. machine) built once from existing corpora. Theoretically, we derive design guidance for how the discretization bins should scale with data and provide a principled justification for our test statistic. Empirically, across multiple datasets, source models, and scenarios, SurpMark consistently matches or surpasses baselines, demonstrating strong robustness across domains and generators; our experiments on hyperparameter sensitivity exhibit trends that our theoretical results help to explain.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_07500
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Black-Box Detection of LLM-Generated Text Using Generalized Jensen-Shannon Divergence
Chen, Shuangyi
Khisti, Ashish
Machine Learning
Information Theory
We study black-box detection of machine-generated text under practical constraints: the scoring model (proxy LM) may mismatch the unknown source model, and per-input contrastive generation is costly. We propose SurpMark, a reference-based detector that summarizes a passage by the dynamics of its token surprisals. SurpMark discretizes surprisals into interpretable states, estimates a state-transition matrix for the test text, and scores it via a generalized Jensen-Shannon (GJS) gap between the test transitions and two fixed references (human vs. machine) built once from existing corpora. Theoretically, we derive design guidance for how the discretization bins should scale with data and provide a principled justification for our test statistic. Empirically, across multiple datasets, source models, and scenarios, SurpMark consistently matches or surpasses baselines, demonstrating strong robustness across domains and generators; our experiments on hyperparameter sensitivity exhibit trends that our theoretical results help to explain.
title Black-Box Detection of LLM-Generated Text Using Generalized Jensen-Shannon Divergence
topic Machine Learning
Information Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07500