Cross-Genre Authorship Attribution via LLM-Based Retrieve-and-Rerank

Abstract: Authorship attribution (AA) is the task of identifying the most likely author of a query document from a predefined set of candidate authors. We introduce a two-stage retrieve-and-rerank framework that finetunes LLMs for cross-genre AA. Unlike the field of information retrieval (IR), where retrieve-and-rerank is a de facto strategy, cross-genre AA systems must avoid relying on topical cues and instead learn to identify author-specific linguistic patterns that are independent of the text's subject matter (genre/domain/topic). Consequently, for the reranker, we demonstrate that training strategies commonly used in IR are fundamentally misaligned with cross-genre AA, leading to suboptimal behavior. To address this, we introduce a targeted data curation strategy that enables the reranker to effectively learn author-discriminative signals. Using our LLM-based retrieve-and-rerank pipeline, we achieve substantial gains of 22.3 and 34.4 absolute Success@8 points over the previous state-of-the-art on HIATUS's challenging HRS1 and HRS2 cross-genre AA benchmarks.