LAMCL: A Length-aware Momentum Contrastive Learning Framework for Multiscale Machine-Revised Text Detection

Bing Zhou, Zhe Huang, Shilei Tan, Kai Zhao, Zhou Yongcheng


Abstract
Detecting machine-revised text that exhibits subtle lexical differences from the original human-generated text remains a challenge. Recent detection methods, including watermarking-based, logit-based, and training-based models, struggle to capture the fine-grained semantic differences, especially for short texts. To address this issue, we propose Length-aware Momentum Contrastive Learning (LAMCL), a novel framework for multiscale machine-revised text detection that integrates two core modules. To enhance the discriminative semantic features, the Enhance Before Detection (EBD) module first fuses the original detected text with the counterpart processed by a Large Language Model (LLM), and then measures semantic consistency to distinguish between machine-revised and human-generated text. Meanwhile, based on the Momentum Contrastive Learning (MCL) framework, the Length-aware Weighting (LW) module leverages text length and label information for hard negative sampling, mitigating the ambiguity of short text attribution and boosting the robustness of representation learning. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms the existing detectors in identifying multiscale machine-revised text across diverse practical scenarios, tasks, and LLMs. The code is available at https://github.com/hangtze/LAMCL.
Anthology ID:
2026.acl-long.1118
Volume:
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, United States
Editors:
Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
24366–24380
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1118/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Bing Zhou, Zhe Huang, Shilei Tan, Kai Zhao, and Zhou Yongcheng. 2026. LAMCL: A Length-aware Momentum Contrastive Learning Framework for Multiscale Machine-Revised Text Detection. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 24366–24380, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
LAMCL: A Length-aware Momentum Contrastive Learning Framework for Multiscale Machine-Revised Text Detection (Zhou et al., ACL 2026)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1118.pdf
Checklist:
 2026.acl-long.1118.checklist.pdf