# Attribution and Obfuscation of Neural Text Authorship: A Data Mining Perspective

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.10488 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10488/

## Key facts

- Cited by 41 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 76 of its 133 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Oct 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 76)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- ["Why Should I Trust You?": Explaining the Predictions of Any Classifier](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.04938/) (2016)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [OPT: Open Pre-trained Transformer Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01068/) (2022)
- [Switch Transformers: Scaling to Trillion Parameter Models with Simple and Efficient Sparsity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.03961/) (2021)
- [The Curious Case of Neural Text Degeneration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09751/) (2019)
- [XLNet: Generalized Autoregressive Pretraining for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08237/) (2019)
- [ALBERT: A Lite BERT for Self-supervised Learning of Language Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11942/) (2019)
- [The Pile: An 800GB Dataset of Diverse Text for Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00027/) (2020)
- [HuggingFace's Transformers: State-of-the-art Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03771/) (2019)
- [DeBERTa: Decoding-enhanced BERT with Disentangled Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03654/) (2020)
- [SimCSE: Simple Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08821/) (2021)
- [Transformer-XL: Attentive Language Models Beyond a Fixed-Length Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.02860/) (2019)
- [RealToxicityPrompts: Evaluating Neural Toxic Degeneration in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.11462/) (2020)
- [DeBERTaV3: Improving DeBERTa using ELECTRA-Style Pre-Training with Gradient-Disentangled Embedding Sharing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09543/) (2021)
- [Hierarchical Neural Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04833/) (2018)
- [Cross-lingual Language Model Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07291/) (2019)
- [Plug and Play Language Models: A Simple Approach to Controlled Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02164/) (2019)
- [CTRL: A Conditional Transformer Language Model for Controllable Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05858/) (2019)
- [GPT-NeoX-20B: An Open-Source Autoregressive Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06745/) (2022)
- [Is BERT Really Robust? A Strong Baseline for Natural Language Attack on Text Classification and Entailment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11932/) (2019)
- [Defending Against Neural Fake News](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.12616/) (2019)
- [GLTR: Statistical Detection and Visualization of Generated Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.04043/) (2019)
- [GeDi: Generative Discriminator Guided Sequence Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.06367/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [Can LLM-Generated Misinformation Be Detected?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13788/) (2023)
- [GPT-who: An Information Density-based Machine-Generated Text Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06202/) (2023)
- [SemEval-2024 Task 8: Multidomain, Multimodel and Multilingual Machine-Generated Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14183/) (2024)
- [Beemo: Benchmark of Expert-edited Machine-generated Outputs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.04032/) (2024)
- [A Ship of Theseus: Curious Cases of Paraphrasing in LLM-Generated Texts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08374/) (2023)
- [Detecting AI-Generated Text: Factors Influencing Detectability with Current Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15583/) (2024)
- [Does Human Collaboration Enhance the Accuracy of Identifying LLM-Generated Deepfake Texts?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01002/) (2023)
- [AI-generated text boundary detection with RoFT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08349/) (2023)
- [Who Wrote it and Why? Prompting Large-Language Models for Authorship Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08123/) (2023)
- [Authorship Obfuscation in Multilingual Machine-Generated Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.07867/) (2024)
- [A Survey of AI-generated Text Forensic Systems: Detection, Attribution, and Characterization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.01152/) (2024)
- [Neural Authorship Attribution: Stylometric Analysis on Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07305/) (2023)
- [TOPFORMER: Topology-Aware Authorship Attribution of Deepfake Texts with Diverse Writing Styles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.12934/) (2023)
- [HANSEN: Human and AI Spoken Text Benchmark for Authorship Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16746/) (2023)
- [Keep It Private: Unsupervised Privatization of Online Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.10260/) (2024)
- [Stress-testing Machine Generated Text Detection: Shifting Language Models Writing Style to Fool Detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.24523/) (2025)
- [Masks and Mimicry: Strategic Obfuscation and Impersonation Attacks on Authorship Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19099/) (2025)
- [Algorithmic Ghost in the Research Shell: Large Language Models and Academic Knowledge Creation in Management Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07304/) (2023)
- [KInIT at SemEval-2024 Task 8: Fine-tuned LLMs for Multilingual Machine-Generated Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13671/) (2024)
- [FDLLM: A Dedicated Detector for Black-Box LLMs Fingerprinting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.16029/) (2025)
- [When Detection Fails: The Power of Fine-Tuned Models to Generate Human-Like Social Media Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09975/) (2025)
- [PRISMM-Bench: A Benchmark of Peer-Review Grounded Multimodal Inconsistencies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.16505/) (2025)
- [Stacking the Odds: Transformer-Based Ensemble for AI-Generated Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18906/) (2023)
- [Lying Blindly: Bypassing ChatGPT's Safeguards to Generate Hard-to-Detect Disinformation Claims](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.08467/) (2024)
- [Generative AI Policies under the Microscope: How CS Conferences Are Navigating the New Frontier in Scholarly Writing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11977/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Automatic Credibility Assessment Using Textual Credibility Signals in the Era of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21360/) (2024)
- [Trends and Challenges in Authorship Analysis: A Review of ML, DL, and LLM Approaches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15422/) (2025)
- [Unveiling Unicode's Unseen Underpinnings in Undermining Authorship Attribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.15840/) (2025)
- [Unraveling Interwoven Roles of Large Language Models in Authorship Privacy: Obfuscation, Mimicking, and Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14195/) (2025)
- [UPTON: Preventing Authorship Leakage from Public Text Release via Data Poisoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09717/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Two interlocking research questions of growing interest and importance in privacy research are Authorship Attribution (AA) and Authorship Obfuscation (AO). Given an artifact, especially a text t in question, an AA solution aims to accurately attribute t to its true author out of many candidate authors while an AO solution aims to modify t to hide its true authorship. Traditionally, the notion of authorship and its accompanying privacy concern is only toward human authors. However, in recent years, due to the explosive advancements in Neural Text Generation (NTG) techniques in NLP, capable of synthesizing human-quality open-ended texts (so-called "neural texts"), one has to now consider authorships by humans, machines, or their combination. Due to the implications and potential threats of neural texts when used maliciously, it has become critical to understand the limitations of traditional AA/AO solutions and develop novel AA/AO solutions in dealing with neural texts. In this survey, therefore, we make a comprehensive review of recent literature on the attribution and obfuscation of neural text authorship from a Data Mining perspective, and share our view on their limitations and promising research directions.