# Is Contrasting All You Need? Contrastive Learning for the Detection and Attribution of AI-generated Text

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.09364 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.09364/

## Key facts

- Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 46 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [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)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [UMAP: Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection for Dimension Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03426/) (2018)
- [XLNet: Generalized Autoregressive Pretraining for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08237/) (2019)
- [Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12712/) (2023)
- [Transformer-XL: Attentive Language Models Beyond a Fixed-Length Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.02860/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Dense Information Retrieval with Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09118/) (2021)
- [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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Can AI-Generated Text be Reliably Detected?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11156/) (2023)
- [Multi-Similarity Loss with General Pair Weighting for Deep Metric Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06627/) (2019)
- [Fast-DetectGPT: Efficient Zero-Shot Detection of Machine-Generated Text via Conditional Probability Curvature](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05130/) (2023)
- [On The Power of Curriculum Learning in Training Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03626/) (2019)
- [Automatic Detection of Generated Text is Easiest when Humans are Fooled](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00650/) (2019)
- [DetectLLM: Leveraging Log Rank Information for Zero-Shot Detection of Machine-Generated Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05540/) (2023)
- [Facebook FAIR's WMT19 News Translation Task Submission](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.06616/) (2019)
- [Automatic Detection of Machine Generated Text: A Critical Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.01314/) (2020)
- [The Science of Detecting LLM-Generated Texts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07205/) (2023)
- [TURINGBENCH: A Benchmark Environment for Turing Test in the Age of Neural Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.13296/) (2021)
- [Intrinsic Dimension Estimation for Robust Detection of AI-Generated Texts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04723/) (2023)
- [Human heuristics for AI-generated language are flawed](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07271/) (2022)
- [Ghostbuster: Detecting Text Ghostwritten by Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15047/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [OpenTuringBench: An Open-Model-based Benchmark and Framework for Machine-Generated Text Detection and Attribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.11369/) (2025)
- [Authorship Attribution in Multilingual Machine-Generated Texts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01656/) (2025)
- [mdok of KInIT: Robustly Fine-tuned LLM for Binary and Multiclass AI-Generated Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01702/) (2025)
- [Machines in the Crowd? Measuring the Footprint of Machine-Generated Text on Reddit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.07226/) (2025)
- [Who Wrote the Book? Detecting and Attributing LLM Ghostwriters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.28054/) (2026)
- [Could AI Trace and Explain the Origins of AI-Generated Images and Text?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04279/) (2025)
- [Luminol-AIDetect: Fast Zero-shot Machine-Generated Text Detection based on Perplexity under Text Shuffling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.25860/) (2026)
- [Hitting a Moving Target: Test-Time Adaptation for AI Text Detection under Continual Distribution Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.25152/) (2026)
- [Latent Trajectory Discrimination for AI-Generated Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.14967/) (2026)
- [Team DACTYL at PAN 2026: Bayesian Data Mixing and Empirical X-risk Minimization for AI-text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.17382/) (2026)
- [Build it, Break it, Repeat: Benchmarking and improving LLM-manipulated disinformation detection in social media posts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.09510/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The significant progress in the development of Large Language Models has contributed to blurring the distinction between human and AI-generated text. The increasing pervasiveness of AI-generated text and the difficulty in detecting it poses new challenges for our society. In this paper, we tackle the problem of detecting and attributing AI-generated text by proposing WhosAI, a triplet-network contrastive learning framework designed to predict whether a given input text has been generated by humans or AI and to unveil the authorship of the text. Unlike most existing approaches, our proposed framework is conceived to learn semantic similarity representations from multiple generators at once, thus equally handling both detection and attribution tasks. Furthermore, WhosAI is model-agnostic and scalable to the release of new AI text-generation models by incorporating their generated instances into the embedding space learned by our framework. Experimental results on the TuringBench benchmark of 200K news articles show that our proposed framework achieves outstanding results in both the Turing Test and Authorship Attribution tasks, outperforming all the methods listed in the TuringBench benchmark leaderboards.