FISSION: Label Augmentation for Bot Detection

arXiv:2609.26279 · cs.AI · Submitted 2026-08-14 · Read on arXiv

cs.AI

Submitted: 2026-08-14

Updated: 2026-08-14

Comments: 37 pages, 10 figures, 20 tables

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: Bot accounts and coordinated influence operations are often discovered via heuristic methods, leaving a dearth of reliable ground-truth labels for training detection systems.

Terminology

Abstract

Bot accounts and coordinated influence operations are often discovered via heuristic methods, leaving a dearth of reliable ground-truth labels for training detection systems. To address this challenge, we study a natural question: can we generate labels to assist in learning embeddings in which bots and accounts from the same coordinated operation are close? We present FISSION, a method to generate labels by splitting each account's activity into positively labeled sub-accounts. Given this label source, we train detection models which preserve behavioral regularities recurring across positive sub-accounts. We evaluate FISSION and show it outperforms prior methods in detecting Wikipedia sockpuppets and Twitter/X bots.

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