Papers with social bot detection
What Does the Bot Say? Opportunities and Risks of Large Language Models in Social Media Bot Detection (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Social media bot detection has always been an arms race between advancements in machine learning and adversarial bot strategies to evade detection. |
| Approach: | They propose a mixture-of-heterogeneous-experts framework to divide and conquer diverse user information modalities and propose LLM-guided manipulation of user textual and structured information to evade detection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on 1,000 annotated examples while bringing down existing detectors by 29.6% and harming calibration and reliability of bot detection systems. |
Exploring and Distilling Multi-Dimensional Clues for Interpretable Social Bot Detection (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing research on social bot detection results directly without corresponding supportive explanations, making it difficult to assess the extent to which such predictions are trustworthy. |
| Approach: | They propose a four-dimensional clue framework that uses outcome-reward reinforcement learning to train inspectors to generate faithful, grounded clues from user information, semantic features, interactive situation, and behavioral pattern. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines in detection performance and significantly improves the performance of large language models. |
TRUST: Towards Robust Social Bot Detection via Uncertainty-Guided Pseudo-Labeling and Graph Structure Purification (2026.findings-acl)
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Ruixuan Xu, Mengting Hu, Zhunheng Wang, Ming Jiang, Rui Ying, Zhen Zhang, Hang Gao, Shuaipeng Liu, Renhong Cheng
| Challenge: | Existing graph-based detection models are vulnerable to deceptive message propagation, where bots deliberately interact with legitimate users. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to mitigate deceptive message propagation by node-level uncertainty estimation and graph structure purification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on three benchmark datasets and six GNN backbones on real-world social bots. |