Skip to content

NERO: Nonparametric Entropy-Rate Oracle for Long-Form AI Text Detection

Latest

Choose a tag to compare

@ishanuc ishanuc released this 04 Feb 20:37
· 70 commits to main since this release

This release provides the reference implementation, datasets, and analysis workflows for NERO (Nonparametric Entropy-Rate Oracle), a model-agnostic, training-free framework for characterizing long-form text via entropy-rate estimation.

NERO estimates the Shannon entropy rate of text mapped to a fixed 27-symbol alphabet (26 letters plus space) using a nonparametric, PFSA-based method. When applied to long-form prose, entropy-rate estimates produced by NERO are systematically lower for contemporary large language model (LLM) outputs than for human-authored text. This intrinsic complexity signal enables robust discrimination between human and AI-generated text without access to model internals, token probabilities, or supervised retraining.

This archive accompanies the paper:

Schmidt R, Chattopadhyay I. Complexity Signature of Generated Text (2026).

The release includes:

  • the compiled NERO binary implementing the entropy-rate estimator,
  • pipelines and metadata for generating long-form AI text (api_data_collection/),
  • curated human reference corpora and categorizations (human_text_categories/),
  • analysis notebooks reproducing all figures and results reported in the paper,
  • derived tables and plot-ready data used for evaluation and visualization,
  • manuscript sources for transparency and archival completeness.

NERO is intended for long-form text analysis (on the order of 10⁴–10⁵ characters or more) and provides a principled, model-independent statistic for AI text detection and for tracking changes in generative behavior across model generations.

License: Non-commercial