arXiv subjects

Bryan E. Tuck

Publications and source records attributed to Bryan E. Tuck.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Orthographic Constraint Satisfaction and Human Difficulty Alignment in Large Language Models

Large language models must satisfy hard orthographic constraints during controlled text generation, yet systematic cross-family evaluation remains limited. We evaluate 39 configurations spanning three model families (Qwen3, Claude Haiku 4.5, GPT-5-mini) on 58 word puzzles requiring character-level constraint satisfaction. Cross-family differences produce substantially larger performance gaps (2.0-2.2x, F1 = 0.761 vs. 0.343) than parameter scaling within families (83% gain from 4B to 32B scaling), and a partial-correlation analysis rules out tokenizer design as a confound for within-family scaling. Thinking budget sensitivity proves heterogeneous: high-capacity models show strong returns (+0.102 to +0.136 F1), while mid-sized variants saturate or degrade, showing inconsistent compute benefits. Using difficulty ratings from 10,000 human solvers per puzzle, we establish modest but consistent calibration (\r{ho} = 0.28-0.42) across all families, yet identify systematic failures on common words with unusual orthography ("data", "loll", "acai": 83-91% human success, 94-98% model miss rate). These failures point to over-reliance on distributional plausibility that penalizes orthographically atypical but constraint-valid patterns.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Guided Perturbation Sensitivity (GPS): Detecting Adversarial Text via Embedding Stability and Word Importance

Adversarial text attacks remain a persistent threat to transformer models, yet existing defenses are typically attack-specific or require costly model retraining, leaving a gap for attack-agnostic detection. We introduce Guided Perturbation Sensitivity (GPS), a detection framework that identifies adversarial examples by measuring how embedding representations change when important words are masked. GPS first ranks words using importance heuristics, then measures embedding sensitivity to masking top-k critical words, and processes the resulting patterns with a BiLSTM detector. Experiments show that adversarially perturbed words exhibit disproportionately high masking sensitivity compared to naturally important words. Across three datasets, three attack types, and two victim models, GPS achieves over 85% detection accuracy and demonstrates competitive performance compared to existing state-of-the-art methods, often at lower computational cost. Using Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (NDCG) to measure perturbation identification quality, we demonstrate that gradient-based ranking significantly outperforms attention, hybrid, and random selection approaches, with identification quality strongly correlating with detection performance for word-level attacks ($\rho = 0.65$). GPS generalizes to unseen datasets, attacks, and models without retraining, providing a practical solution for adversarial text detection.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Unmasking the Imposters: How Censorship and Domain Adaptation Affect the Detection of Machine-Generated Tweets

The rapid development of large language models (LLMs) has significantly improved the generation of fluent and convincing text, raising concerns about their potential misuse on social media platforms. We present a comprehensive methodology for creating nine Twitter datasets to examine the generative capabilities of four prominent LLMs: Llama 3, Mistral, Qwen2, and GPT4o. These datasets encompass four censored and five uncensored model configurations, including 7B and 8B parameter base-instruction models of the three open-source LLMs. Additionally, we perform a data quality analysis to assess the characteristics of textual outputs from human, "censored," and "uncensored" models, employing semantic meaning, lexical richness, structural patterns, content characteristics, and detector performance metrics to identify differences and similarities. Our evaluation demonstrates that "uncensored" models significantly undermine the effectiveness of automated detection methods. This study addresses a critical gap by exploring smaller open-source models and the ramifications of "uncensoring," providing valuable insights into how domain adaptation and content moderation strategies influence both the detectability and structural characteristics of machine-generated text.

cs.CL↗