LLM one-shot style transfer for Authorship Attribution and Verification

Abstract

Computational stylometry studies writing style through quantitative textual patterns, enabling applications such as authorship attribution, identity linking, and plagiarism detection. Existing supervised and contrastive approaches often rely on datasets with spurious correlations, conflating style with topic. Despite the relevance of language modeling to these tasks, the pre-training of modern large language models (LLMs) has been underutilized in general authorship analysis. We introduce an unsupervised framework that uses the log-probabilities of an LLM to measure style transferability between two texts. This framework takes advantage of the extensive CLM pre-training and in-context capabilities of modern LLMs. Our approach avoids explicit supervision with spuriously correlated data. Our method substantially outperforms unsupervised prompting-based baselines at similar model sizes and exceeds contrastively trained models when controlling for topical overlap. Our framework's performance improves with model size. In the case of authorship verification, we present an additional mechanism that increases test-time computation to improve accuracy; enabling flexible trade-offs between computational cost and task performance.