TRACE-Bot: Detecting Emerging LLM-Driven Social Bots via Implicit Semantic Representations and AIGC-Enhanced Behavioral Patterns

TL;DR

TRACE-Bot introduces a dual-channel detection framework that combines semantic and behavioral analysis to effectively identify emerging LLM-driven social bots, outperforming existing methods.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel unified dual-channel framework that jointly models semantic and behavioral signals, enhancing detection accuracy and robustness against sophisticated social bots.

Findings

Achieved state-of-the-art detection accuracies of 98.46% and 97.50%.

Demonstrated robustness against advanced bot strategies.

Effectively fused heterogeneous data sources for improved detection.

Abstract

Large Language Model-driven (LLM-driven) social bots pose a growing threat to online discourse by generating human-like content that evades conventional detection. Existing methods suffer from limited detection accuracy due to overreliance on single-modality signals, insufficient sensitivity to the specific generative patterns of Artificial Intelligence-Generated Content (AIGC), and a failure to adequately model the interplay between linguistic patterns and behavioral dynamics. To address these limitations, we propose TRACE-Bot, a unified dual-channel framework that jointly models implicit semantic representations and AIGC-enhanced behavioral patterns. TRACE-Bot constructs fine-grained representations from heterogeneous sources, including personal information data, interaction behavior data and tweet data. A dual-channel architecture captures linguistic representations via a pretrained language model and behavioral irregularities via multidimensional activity features augmented with signals from state-of-the-art (SOTA) AIGC detectors. The fused representations are then classified through a lightweight prediction head. Experiments on two public LLM-driven social bot datasets demonstrate SOTA performance, achieving accuracies of 98.46% and 97.50%, respectively. The results further indicate strong robustness against advanced bot strategies, highlighting the effectiveness of jointly leveraging implicit semantic representations and AIGC-enhanced behavioral patterns for emerging LLM-driven social bot detection.