SYSUpporter at SemEval-2026 Task 13: Leveraging Stylistic Signals and Language-Aware Truncation for Machine-Generated Code Detection
Summary
The SYSUpporter system, developed for SemEval-2026 Task 13 Subtask B, addresses the challenge of attributing source code to either a human author or one of 10 specific LLM families. This system tackles practical issues like formatting fingerprints often discarded by tokenizers, heterogeneous code lengths, and extreme class imbalance within datasets. Building upon unixcoder-base, SYSUpporter integrates Explicit Stylistic Prompting, Language-Aware Truncation, and imbalance-aware training techniques such as Focal Loss, GeM pooling, multi-sample dropout, and bucket batching. The system achieved a 0.434 Macro F1 score on the official hidden test set, ranking 4th out of 34 teams with only 125M parameters. Controlled 5-fold cross-validation confirmed each component's contribution, and a formatting-normalization study quantified the model's reliance on formatting cues.
Key takeaway
For Machine Learning Engineers developing code attribution models, consider integrating the SYSUpporter system's approach. Its success in SemEval-2026 Task 13 highlights the importance of leveraging stylistic signals and language-aware truncation. You should explore applying imbalance-aware training techniques like Focal Loss to improve performance on datasets with skewed class distributions, especially when distinguishing between multiple LLM families.
Key insights
Stylistic signals and language-aware truncation are key for robust machine-generated code detection and LLM attribution.
Principles
- Formatting fingerprints are critical for code authorship.
- Heterogeneous code lengths require specific truncation strategies.
- Extreme class imbalance necessitates imbalance-aware training.
Method
The system enhances unixcoder-base with Explicit Stylistic Prompting, Language-Aware Truncation, and imbalance-aware training using Focal Loss, GeM pooling, multi-sample dropout, and bucket batching.
In practice
- Employ Explicit Stylistic Prompting for code attribution.
- Implement Language-Aware Truncation for varied code inputs.
- Apply Focal Loss to address dataset class imbalance.
Topics
- Machine-Generated Code Detection
- LLM Attribution
- Stylistic Analysis
- SemEval-2026
- Focal Loss
- Code Authorship
Best for: Research Scientist, AI Scientist, Machine Learning Engineer, AI Security Engineer
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Editorial summary, takeaway, and curation by AIssential. Original article published by Paper Index on ACL Anthology.