# Short-PHD: Detecting Short LLM-generated Text with Topological Data Analysis After Off-topic Content Insertion

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.02873 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.02873/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Apr 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12948/) (2025)
- [OPT: Open Pre-trained Transformer Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01068/) (2022)
- [TruthfulQA: Measuring How Models Mimic Human Falsehoods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07958/) (2021)
- [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)
- [GPT-NeoX-20B: An Open-Source Autoregressive Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06745/) (2022)
- [ELI5: Long Form Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.09190/) (2019)
- [Defending Against Neural Fake News](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.12616/) (2019)
- [Release Strategies and the Social Impacts of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09203/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Fast-DetectGPT: Efficient Zero-Shot Detection of Machine-Generated Text via Conditional Probability Curvature](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05130/) (2023)
- [Automatic Detection of Generated Text is Easiest when Humans are Fooled](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00650/) (2019)
- [OPT-IML: Scaling Language Model Instruction Meta Learning through the Lens of Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.12017/) (2022)
- [DetectLLM: Leveraging Log Rank Information for Zero-Shot Detection of Machine-Generated Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05540/) (2023)
- [WikiHow: A Large Scale Text Summarization Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.09305/) (2018)
- [An introduction to Topological Data Analysis: fundamental and practical aspects for data scientists](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.04019/) (2017)
- [MAGE: Machine-generated Text Detection in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13242/) (2023)
- [Ripser: efficient computation of Vietoris-Rips persistence barcodes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02518/) (2019)
- [Intrinsic Dimension Estimation for Robust Detection of AI-Generated Texts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04723/) (2023)
- [Real or Fake? Learning to Discriminate Machine from Human Generated Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03351/) (2019)
- [Intrinsic Dimension, Persistent Homology and Generalization in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13171/) (2021)
- [Hausdorff Dimension, Heavy Tails, and Generalization in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09313/) (2020)
- [Bias of AI-Generated Content: An Examination of News Produced by Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.09825/) (2023)
- [Detecting Bot-Generated Text by Characterizing Linguistic Accommodation in Human-Bot Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01170/) (2021)

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

- [When Personalization Tricks Detectors: The Feature-Inversion Trap in Machine-Generated Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.12476/) (2025)
- [Listening to the Workforce: Measuring Construction Worker Safety Attitudes from Social Media Discourse Using LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.04450/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The malicious usage of large language models (LLMs) has motivated the detection of LLM-generated texts. Previous work in topological data analysis shows that the persistent homology dimension (PHD) of text embeddings can serve as a more robust and promising score than other zero-shot methods. However, effectively detecting short LLM-generated texts remains a challenge. This paper presents Short-PHD, a zero-shot LLM-generated text detection method tailored for short texts. Short-PHD stabilizes the estimation of the previous PHD method for short texts by inserting off-topic content before the given input text and identifies LLM-generated text based on an established detection threshold. Experimental results on both public and generated datasets demonstrate that Short-PHD outperforms existing zero-shot methods in short LLM-generated text detection. Implementation codes are available online.