This paper presents the approach we proposed for GenAI Detection Task 2, which aims to classify a given text as either machine-generated or human-written, with a particular emphasis on academic essays. We participated in subtasks A and B, which focus on detecting English and Arabic essays, respectively. We propose a simple and efficient method for detecting machine-generated essays, where we use the Llama-3.1-8B as a proxy to capture the essence of each token in the text. These essences are processed and classified using a refined feature classification network. Our approach does not require fine-tuning the LLM. Instead, we leverage its extensive multilingual knowledge acquired during pretraining to significantly enhance detection performance. The results validate the effectiveness of our approach and demonstrate that leveraging a proxy model with diverse multilingual knowledge can significantly enhance the detection of machine-generated text across multiple languages, regardless of model size. In Subtask A, we achieved an F1 score of 99.9%, ranking first out of 26 teams. In Subtask B, we achieved an F1 score of 96.5%, placing fourth out of 22 teams, with the same score as the third-place team.

The increasing capability and widespread usage of large language models (LLMs) highlight the desirability of automatic detection of LLM-generated text. Zero-shot detectors, due to their training-free nature, have received considerable attention and notable success. In this paper, we identify a new feature, token cohesiveness, that is useful for zero-shot detection, and we demonstrate that LLM-generated text tends to exhibit higher token cohesiveness than human-written text. Based on this observation, we devise TOCSIN, a generic dual-channel detection paradigm that uses token cohesiveness as a plug-and-play module to improve existing zero-shot detectors. To calculate token cohesiveness, TOCSIN only requires a few rounds of random token deletion and semantic difference measurement, making it particularly suitable for a practical black-box setting where the source model used for generation is not accessible. Extensive experiments with four state-of-the-art base detectors on various datasets, source models, and evaluation settings demonstrate the effectiveness and generality of the proposed approach. Code available at: https://github.com/Shixuan-Ma/TOCSIN.