When Less is More: Understanding When Token Filtering Helps and Fails in AI-generated Text Detection

📅 2026-08-30
📈 Citations: 0
✨ Influential: 0
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🤖 AI Summary
研究探讨了在AI生成文本检测中,通过减少标记数量来提高检测性能的问题,使用熵差距评分和概率过滤方法分析了不同场景下的效果。
📝 Abstract
The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has made AI-generated text detection increasingly critical. Existing zero-shot detectors assume that more token-level evidence leads to more reliable detection. However, our empirical study challenges this consensus: fewer tokens sometimes work better, retaining only 40% can yield optimal performance, yet this benefit is not universal. Using the Entropy Gap Score (EGS), we introduce top-$k$ cumulative probability filtering as a diagnostic probe. Across three representative settings, filtering exhibits strikingly different behaviors. We analyze EGS via typical set theory and quantify its dynamics through entropy calibration and distribution analysis. We find that filtering helps for weak source LMs, where low-entropy tokens are harmful, but fails for strong source LMs, where they are not notably harmful. Our work provides the first systematic analysis showing that some tokens are not merely uninformative but systematically harmful due to entropy miscalibration, revealing a two-sided trade-off in token-level detection.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

Token Filtering
AI-generated Text Detection
Entropy Gap Score
Large Language Models
Zero-shot Detectors
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

Entropy Gap Score (EGS)
top-k cumulative probability filtering
token-level detection
entropy miscalibration
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Xiaoyang Han
College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China
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Lvxiaowei Xu
College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China
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Ming Cai
College of Artificial Intelligence, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China