# DetectLLM: Leveraging Log Rank Information for Zero-Shot Detection of Machine-Generated Text

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.05540 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05540/

## Key facts

- Cited by 210 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05250/) (2016)
- [OPT: Open Pre-trained Transformer Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01068/) (2022)
- [The Curious Case of Neural Text Degeneration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09751/) (2019)
- [The Pile: An 800GB Dataset of Diverse Text for Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00027/) (2020)
- [BLOOM: A 176B-Parameter Open-Access Multilingual Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05100/) (2022)
- [Don't Give Me the Details, Just the Summary! Topic-Aware Convolutional Neural Networks for Extreme Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.08745/) (2018)
- [Hierarchical Neural Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04833/) (2018)
- [DetectGPT: Zero-Shot Machine-Generated Text Detection using Probability Curvature](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11305/) (2023)
- [A Watermark for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.10226/) (2023)
- [GPT-NeoX-20B: An Open-Source Autoregressive Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06745/) (2022)
- [Release Strategies and the Social Impacts of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09203/) (2019)
- [GLTR: Statistical Detection and Visualization of Generated Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.04043/) (2019)
- [How Close is ChatGPT to Human Experts? Comparison Corpus, Evaluation, and Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.07597/) (2023)
- [Paraphrasing evades detectors of AI-generated text, but retrieval is an effective defense](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13408/) (2023)
- [Can AI-Generated Text be Reliably Detected?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11156/) (2023)
- [Snorkel: Rapid Training Data Creation with Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10160/) (2017)
- [Automatic Detection of Generated Text is Easiest when Humans are Fooled](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00650/) (2019)
- [Leveraging Large Language Models for Multiple Choice Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.12353/) (2022)
- [Automatic Detection of Machine Generated Text: A Critical Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.01314/) (2020)
- [Adversarial Watermarking Transformer: Towards Tracing Text Provenance with Data Hiding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03015/) (2020)
- [TweepFake: about Detecting Deepfake Tweets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.00036/) (2020)
- [Real or Fake? Learning to Discriminate Machine from Human Generated Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03351/) (2019)
- [MGTBench: Benchmarking Machine-Generated Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14822/) (2023)
- [Protecting Language Generation Models via Invisible Watermarking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03162/) (2023)
- [Red teaming ChatGPT via Jailbreaking: Bias, Robustness, Reliability and Toxicity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12867/) (2023)
- [The Ethical Need for Watermarks in Machine-Generated Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03118/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 210)

- [Fast-DetectGPT: Efficient Zero-Shot Detection of Machine-Generated Text via Conditional Probability Curvature](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05130/) (2023)
- [Spotting LLMs With Binoculars: Zero-Shot Detection of Machine-Generated Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12070/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Confidence Estimation and Calibration in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08298/) (2023)
- [Can LLM-Generated Misinformation Be Detected?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13788/) (2023)
- [A Survey on LLM-Generated Text Detection: Necessity, Methods, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14724/) (2023)
- [Detecting Multimedia Generated by Large AI Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00045/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Detection of LLMs-Generated Content](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15654/) (2023)
- [An Unforgeable Publicly Verifiable Watermark for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16230/) (2023)
- [DeepScientist: Advancing Frontier-Pushing Scientific Findings Progressively](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.26603/) (2025)
- [DeTeCtive: Detecting AI-generated Text via Multi-Level Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.20964/) (2024)
- [Zero-Shot Detection of AI-Generated Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.15875/) (2024)
- [M4GT-Bench: Evaluation Benchmark for Black-Box Machine-Generated Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11175/) (2024)
- [GPT-who: An Information Density-based Machine-Generated Text Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06202/) (2023)
- [DetectRL: Benchmarking LLM-Generated Text Detection in Real-World Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23746/) (2024)
- [GumbelSoft: Diversified Language Model Watermarking via the GumbelMax-trick](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12948/) (2024)
- [Securing Large Language Models: Threats, Vulnerabilities and Responsible Practices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12503/) (2024)
- [Understanding the Repeat Curse in Large Language Models from a Feature Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14218/) (2025)
- [Training-free LLM-generated Text Detection by Mining Token Probability Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06072/) (2024)
- [Are We in the AI-Generated Text World Already? Quantifying and Monitoring AIGT on Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.18148/) (2024)
- [Technical Report on the Pangram AI-Generated Text Classifier](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14873/) (2024)
- [SemEval-2024 Task 8: Multidomain, Multimodel and Multilingual Machine-Generated Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14183/) (2024)
- [Between Lines of Code: Unraveling the Distinct Patterns of Machine and Human Programmers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06461/) (2024)
- [Humanizing Machine-Generated Content: Evading AI-Text Detection through Adversarial Attack](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01907/) (2024)
- [Who Wrote This? The Key to Zero-Shot LLM-Generated Text Detection Is GECScore](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.04286/) (2024)
- [Beemo: Benchmark of Expert-edited Machine-generated Outputs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.04032/) (2024)
- [Stumbling Blocks: Stress Testing the Robustness of Machine-Generated Text Detectors Under Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11638/) (2024)
- [Detecting Subtle Differences between Human and Model Languages Using Spectrum of Relative Likelihood](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19874/) (2024)
- [RepreGuard: Detecting LLM-Generated Text by Revealing Hidden Representation Patterns](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.13152/) (2025)
- [Detecting AI-Generated Text: Factors Influencing Detectability with Current Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15583/) (2024)
- [Imitate Before Detect: Aligning Machine Stylistic Preference for Machine-Revised Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10432/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

With the rapid progress of large language models (LLMs) and the huge amount of text they generated, it becomes more and more impractical to manually distinguish whether a text is machine-generated. Given the growing use of LLMs in social media and education, it prompts us to develop methods to detect machine-generated text, preventing malicious usage such as plagiarism, misinformation, and propaganda. Previous work has studied several zero-shot methods, which require no training data. These methods achieve good performance, but there is still a lot of room for improvement. In this paper, we introduce two novel zero-shot methods for detecting machine-generated text by leveraging the log rank information. One is called DetectLLM-LRR, which is fast and efficient, and the other is called DetectLLM-NPR, which is more accurate, but slower due to the need for perturbations. Our experiments on three datasets and seven language models show that our proposed methods improve over the state of the art by 3.9 and 1.75 AUROC points absolute. Moreover, DetectLLM-NPR needs fewer perturbations than previous work to achieve the same level of performance, which makes it more practical for real-world use. We also investigate the efficiency--performance trade-off based on users preference on these two measures and we provide intuition for using them in practice effectively. We release the data and the code of both methods in https://github.com/mbzuai-nlp/DetectLLM