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Telescope: Improving Zero Shot Detection of LLM Generated Content By Measuring Token Repetition Probability
arXiv:2607.04061v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Distinguishing Large Language Model (LLM) generated text from human writing is a critical and difficult challenge. While LLMs are trained to write lik
arXiv:2607.04061v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Distinguishing Large Language Model (LLM) generated text from human writing is a critical and difficult challenge. While LLMs are trained to write like humans, we hypothesize that this training leaves an indelible mark. LLMs develop a particularly strong aversion to token repetition very early in training. This bias persists as a ''Vestigial Heuristic'' (a developmental artifact) that is activated in LLM-generated text, separating LLM from human writing. To probe this phenomenon, we introduce Telescope Perplexity, a metric that evaluates the token repetition of the model, P(s_i | s_{1:i}) . Our empirical investigation reveals that the Telescope Perplexity signature emerges early in pre-training, and Telescope Perplexity empirically enables highly effective zero-shot LLM detection. We show state-of-the-art or competitive performance across diverse datasets (including modern evaluation sets we introduce), reference models, and perturbation schemes with greater efficiency than other methods.
Source: arXiv cs.AI | 2026-07-07