Systems and methods for detecting collisions in radio frequency tags in accordance with embodiments of the invention are disclosed. In one embodiment, a receiver system includes a receiver configured to receive and sample a phase modulated input signal, and a multiple symbol noncoherent soft output detector configured to receive the sampled input signal and to generate a soft metric indicative of the reliability of a detected symbol based upon observations over multiple symbols, a collision detector configured to calculate a decision metric from a set of soft metrics generated by the multiple symbol noncoherent soft output detector and detect a collision when the decision metric satisfies a predetermined criterion.