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Oral
DetectGPT: Zero-Shot Machine-Generated Text Detection using Probability Curvature
Eric Mitchell · Yoonho Lee · Alexander Khazatsky · Christopher Manning · Chelsea Finn

Wed Jul 26 07:32 PM -- 07:40 PM (PDT) @ Ballroom C

The increasing fluency and widespread usage of large language models (LLMs) highlight the desirability of corresponding tools aiding detection of LLM-generated text. In this paper, we identify a property of the structure of an LLM's probability function that is useful for such detection. Specifically, we demonstrate that text sampled from an LLM tends to occupy negative curvature regions of the model's log probability function. Leveraging this observation, we then define a new curvature-based criterion for judging if a passage is generated from a given LLM. This approach, which we call DetectGPT, does not require training a separate classifier, collecting a dataset of real or generated passages, or explicitly watermarking generated text. It uses only log probabilities computed by the model of interest and random perturbations of the passage from another generic pre-trained language model (e.g., T5). We find DetectGPT is more discriminative than existing zero-shot methods for model sample detection, notably improving detection of fake news articles generated by 20B parameter GPT-NeoX from 0.81 AUROC for the strongest zero-shot baseline to 0.95 AUROC for DetectGPT.

Author Information

Eric Mitchell (Stanford)
Yoonho Lee (Stanford University)
Alexander Khazatsky (Stanford University)
Christopher Manning (Stanford University)
Chelsea Finn (Stanford)

Chelsea Finn is an Assistant Professor in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. Finn's research interests lie in the capability of robots and other agents to develop broadly intelligent behavior through learning and interaction. To this end, her work has included deep learning algorithms for concurrently learning visual perception and control in robotic manipulation skills, inverse reinforcement methods for learning reward functions underlying behavior, and meta-learning algorithms that can enable fast, few-shot adaptation in both visual perception and deep reinforcement learning. Finn received her Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and her PhD in Computer Science at UC Berkeley. Her research has been recognized through the ACM doctoral dissertation award, the Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship, the C.V. Ramamoorthy Distinguished Research Award, and the MIT Technology Review 35 under 35 Award, and her work has been covered by various media outlets, including the New York Times, Wired, and Bloomberg. Throughout her career, she has sought to increase the representation of underrepresented minorities within CS and AI by developing an AI outreach camp at Berkeley for underprivileged high school students, a mentoring program for underrepresented undergraduates across four universities, and leading efforts within the WiML and Berkeley WiCSE communities of women researchers.

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