# To Burst or Not to Burst: Generating and Quantifying Improbable Text

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.15476 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.15476/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Jan 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08361/) (2020)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [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)
- [fairseq: A Fast, Extensible Toolkit for Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01038/) (2019)
- [Hierarchical Neural Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04833/) (2018)
- [A Diversity-Promoting Objective Function for Neural Conversation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.03055/) (2015)
- [Abstractive Text Summarization Using Sequence-to-Sequence RNNs and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.06023/) (2016)
- [CTRL: A Conditional Transformer Language Model for Controllable Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05858/) (2019)
- [Compressive Transformers for Long-Range Sequence Modelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05507/) (2019)
- [DetectGPT: Zero-Shot Machine-Generated Text Detection using Probability Curvature](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11305/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Texygen: A Benchmarking Platform for Text Generation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.01886/) (2018)
- [Towards a Unified Multi-Dimensional Evaluator for Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07197/) (2022)
- [SemEval-2017 Task 4: Sentiment Analysis in Twitter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.00741/) (2019)
- [On the Use of ArXiv as a Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00075/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [The Impact of Prompts on Zero-Shot Detection of AI-Generated Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.20127/) (2024)
- [Differentiating Between Human-Written and AI-Generated Texts Using Automatically Extracted Linguistic Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03646/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While large language models (LLMs) are extremely capable at text generation, their outputs are still distinguishable from human-authored text. We explore this separation across many metrics over text, many sampling techniques, many types of text data, and across two popular LLMs, LLaMA and Vicuna. Along the way, we introduce a new metric, recoverability, to highlight differences between human and machine text; and we propose a new sampling technique, burst sampling, designed to close this gap. We find that LLaMA and Vicuna have distinct distributions under many of the metrics, and that this influences our results: Recoverability separates real from fake text better than any other metric when using LLaMA. When using Vicuna, burst sampling produces text which is distributionally closer to real text compared to other sampling techniques.