现有AI文本检测器常依赖数据集特定特征,而非真实机器写作信号。
Why AI-Generated Text Detection Fails: Evidence from Explainable AI Beyond Benchmark Accuracy
- 结合语言特征工程与可解释AI,构建新型检测框架
- 在两个基准数据集上达F1 0.9734,但跨域性能大幅下降
- 揭示检测器依赖风格线索,适合关注鲁棒性研究者
大型语言模型的广泛应用使识别生成文本成为紧迫挑战。尽管诸多检测系统在基准测试中表现优异,其在真实场景下的可靠性与可解释性仍存疑。本文探究当前检测器是否真正识别机器作者,还是仅利用数据集特异性特征。提出一种融合语言特征工程、机器学习与可解释AI的检测框架。在PAN CLEF 2025与COLING 2025两个主流语料库上,基于30个语言特征训练的模型达到0.9734的F1分数,性能领先。然而系统性跨域评估显示显著泛化失败:域内表现优异的分类器在分布偏移下性能急剧下降。通过SHAP解释发现,不同数据集下最具影响力的特征差异显著,表明检测器常依赖数据集特定风格线索,而非稳定机器写作信号。深入错误分析揭示语言特征检测的根本矛盾:在域内最具区分性的特征也最易受领域转移、格式变化与文本长度影响。本文成果有助于构建更鲁棒的检测系统。为支持复现与应用,开源提供可输出预测与实例级解释的Python包。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
The widespread adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) has made the detection of AI-Generated text a pressing and complex challenge. Although many detection systems report high benchmark accuracy, their reliability in real-world settings remains uncertain, and their interpretability is often unexplored. In this work, we investigate whether contemporary detectors genuinely identify machine authorship or merely exploit dataset-specific artefacts. We propose an interpretable detection framework that integrates linguistic feature engineering, machine learning, and explainable AI techniques. When evaluated on two prominent benchmark corpora, namely PAN CLEF 2025 and COLING 2025, our model trained on 30 linguistic features achieves leaderboard-competitive performance, attaining an F1 score of 0.9734. However, systematic cross-domain and cross-generator evaluation reveals substantial generalisation failure: classifiers that excel in-domain degrade significantly under distribution shift. Using SHAP- based explanations, we show that the most influential features differ markedly between datasets, indicating that detectors often rely on dataset-specific stylistic cues rather than stable signals of machine authorship. Further investigation with in-depth error analysis exposes a fundamental tension in linguistic-feature-based AI text detection: the features that are most discriminative on in-domain data are also the features most susceptible to domain shift, formatting variation, and text-length effects. We believe that this knowledge helps build AI detectors that are robust across different settings. To support replication and practical use, we release an open-source Python package that returns both predictions and instance-level explanations for individual texts.
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