Cross-table Synthetic Tabular Data Detection

G. Charbel N. Kindji, Lina M. Rojas Barahona, Elisa Fromont, Tanguy Urvoy


Abstract
Detecting synthetic tabular data is essential to prevent the distribution of false or manipulated datasets that could compromise data-driven decision-making. This study explores whether synthetic tabular data can be reliably identified “in the wild”—meaning across different generators, domains, and table formats. This challenge is unique to tabular data, where structures (such as number of columns, data types, and formats) can vary widely from one table to another. We propose three cross-table baseline detectors and four distinct evaluation protocols, each corresponding to a different level of “wildness”. Our very preliminary results confirm that cross-table adaptation is a challenging task.
Anthology ID:
2025.genaidetect-1.5
Volume:
Proceedings of the 1stWorkshop on GenAI Content Detection (GenAIDetect)
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Firoj Alam, Preslav Nakov, Nizar Habash, Iryna Gurevych, Shammur Chowdhury, Artem Shelmanov, Yuxia Wang, Ekaterina Artemova, Mucahid Kutlu, George Mikros
Venues:
GenAIDetect | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
78–84
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.genaidetect-1.5/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
G. Charbel N. Kindji, Lina M. Rojas Barahona, Elisa Fromont, and Tanguy Urvoy. 2025. Cross-table Synthetic Tabular Data Detection. In Proceedings of the 1stWorkshop on GenAI Content Detection (GenAIDetect), pages 78–84, Abu Dhabi, UAE. International Conference on Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Cross-table Synthetic Tabular Data Detection (Kindji et al., GenAIDetect 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.genaidetect-1.5.pdf