# Detecting LLM-Generated Spam Reviews by Integrating Language Model Embeddings and Graph Neural Network

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01801 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.01801/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Oct 2025.

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

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [Inductive Representation Learning on Large Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02216/) (2017)
- [A Survey on LLM-as-a-Judge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15594/) (2024)
- [Defending Against Neural Fake News](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.12616/) (2019)
- [Masked Label Prediction: Unified Message Passing Model for Semi-Supervised Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03509/) (2020)
- [Enhancing Graph Neural Network-based Fraud Detectors against Camouflaged Fraudsters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.08692/) (2020)
- [Bridging Language and Items for Retrieval and Recommendation: Benchmarking LLMs as Semantic Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03952/) (2024)
- [On the Risk of Misinformation Pollution with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13661/) (2023)
- [Jasper and Stella: distillation of SOTA embedding models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.19048/) (2024)
- [Fake News in Sheep's Clothing: Robust Fake News Detection Against LLM-Empowered Style Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10830/) (2023)
- [GCN-Based User Representation Learning for Unifying Robust Recommendation and Fraudster Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10150/) (2020)
- [Nuclear Deployed: Analyzing Catastrophic Risks in Decision-making of Autonomous LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11355/) (2025)
- [What Does the Bot Say? Opportunities and Risks of Large Language Models in Social Media Bot Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00371/) (2024)
- [Revisiting Graph-Based Fraud Detection in Sight of Heterophily and Spectrum](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06441/) (2023)
- [Conan-embedding: General Text Embedding with More and Better Negative Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15710/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Large Language Models in the Abuse Detection Pipeline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.00323/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The rise of large language models (LLMs) has enabled the generation of highly persuasive spam reviews that closely mimic human writing. These reviews pose significant challenges for existing detection systems and threaten the credibility of online platforms. In this work, we first create three realistic LLM-generated spam review datasets using three distinct LLMs, each guided by product metadata and genuine reference reviews. Evaluations by GPT-4.1 confirm the high persuasion and deceptive potential of these reviews. To address this threat, we propose FraudSquad, a hybrid detection model that integrates text embeddings from a pre-trained language model with a gated graph transformer for spam node classification. FraudSquad captures both semantic and behavioral signals without relying on manual feature engineering or massive training resources. Experiments show that FraudSquad outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by up to 44.22% in precision and 43.01% in recall on three LLM-generated datasets, while also achieving promising results on two human-written spam datasets. Furthermore, FraudSquad maintains a modest model size and requires minimal labeled training data, making it a practical solution for real-world applications. Our contributions include new synthetic datasets, a practical detection framework, and empirical evidence highlighting the urgency of adapting spam detection to the LLM era. Our code and datasets are available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/FraudSquad-5389/.
