Papers for

academic integrity teams

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Robust method identifies which AI model wrote a text

Who's Behind the Text? Robust Model Authorship Attribution

Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to generate text, their misuse has become a growing societal problem, with implications for academic misconduct, model distillation, and cyberattacks. For these reasons, Model Authorship Attribution (MAA), which identifies the source model of a given text, is important for promoting the responsible use of LLMs and improving AI safety. In practice, attribution systems must remain reliable beyond the distributions observed during training. They may encounter texts from unseen domains and writing settings, as well as generations from future versions of model families that were not available when the system was trained. However, existing MAA methods often exhibit substantial performance degradation under such distribution shifts. To address this challenge, we propose Authorship Tracing via Likelihood-based Attribution of Sources (ATLAS), which formulates MAA through source-conditioned text modeling rather than direct source prediction. ATLAS learns how text from each source family is generated and attributes a given text by comparing its likelihood under each learned source condition. We aggregate this likelihood evidence at the token level with clipping so that no single token dominates the decision. We further introduce MAABench, a broad MAA benchmark for evaluating practical OOD settings such as domain and version. Our experiments show that ATLAS consistently outperforms existing baselines across MAABench and OpenTuringBench. In particular, when both the generation domain and the model version change on MAABench, ATLAS achieves 74.27% accuracy, 9.00pp higher than the strongest baseline. Beyond MAA, ATLAS can also help identify distillation source models by measuring which source model a target LLM most closely resembles. Our extended experiments show that ATLAS recovers the known teacher of every distilled model we evaluate.

Wed 14 OctArtificial IntelligenceComputation and LanguageMachine Learning
The gist
As more AI systems create text, it becomes harder to tell which model made a specific piece. The authors introduce a method called ATLAS that figures out the source model by checking how likely each model would produce that text. This approach works better than previous methods, even when the text is very different or comes from newer AI models. They also created a new test suite to check how well their method works in real-world scenarios. Additionally, ATLAS can identify which model was used to create smaller 'student' AI models from bigger ones.
Open → 2610.19583v1

New method measures outside info in peer reviews using language models

How Much Were You Told? Measuring External Information in Peer Reviews

Abstract: Conference policies distinguish using Large Language Models (LLMs) to polish one's own review from delegating the critique, but current Artificial Text Detection (ATD) methods largely measure surface form rather than the origin of its content. We instead measure the external information carried by a review: information not explained by the reviewed paper and a generic reviewing instruction. We propose Self-Conditioning, an unsupervised information-theoretic estimator that compares the likelihood of a review under its production context with its likelihood when that context is augmented with hints extracted from the review itself. On the IntelLabs peer-review benchmark, Self-Conditioning separates fully-delegated from machine-polished reviews with AUC up to $1.0$ while remaining largely insensitive to surface rewriting. Moreover, as generators receive increasing amounts of externally-provided information, their scores move monotonically towards the human regime, unlike standard ATD baselines. High-temperature sampling can evade the estimator, but at the cost of output quality.

Wed 23 SeptComputation and Language
The gist
It is hard to tell if peer reviews used outside help like large language models to write the critique or just polished their own words. The authors created a method called Self-Conditioning that looks at how much extra information a review contains beyond the paper and instructions, rather than just how it sounds. Their method can very accurately spot reviews that were fully outsourced to AI versus lightly edited ones. It also tracks how much outside info the AI used and is harder to fool by simple rewriting tricks.
Open → 2609.28041v1

Stylometric features detect GPT-assisted student writing effectively

Detecting GPT-Assisted Writing Using Interpretable Stylometric Features

Abstract: Distinguishing GPT-assisted from independently authored student writing has become a critical challenge in academia. This paper evaluates the discriminative capability of interpretable stylometric features extracted solely from submitted text. Using data from 90 participants who wrote both independently and with ChatGPT assistance, we evaluate eight machine learning classifiers while keeping data from the same participant together during validation. On the held-out test set, Random Forest achieved an ROC-AUC of 0.87 and an F1-score of 0.84, with False Positive and False Negative rates of 22.2% and 11.1%, respectively. SHAP analysis shows that lexical and grammatical characteristics drive the resulting predictions. The findings suggest that transparent, text-intrinsic features provide measurable signal for detecting GPT-assisted writing.

Tue 22 SeptComputation and LanguageComputers and Society
The gist
It can be hard to tell when students get help from AI like ChatGPT in their writing. This study shows that by looking closely at word choices and grammar, computers can tell if someone wrote an essay alone or used AI help. The researchers tested different computer programs and found one that was good at spotting AI-assisted writing. This means it’s possible to detect AI help just by analyzing the writing itself.
Open → 2609.26687v1

AI assistance leaves timing patterns that reveal overreliance in writing and coding

Does AI Assistance Leave a Temporal Fingerprint? Detecting Overreliance in AI-Assisted Writing and Programming

Abstract: The rapid adoption of generative AI has made final artifacts unreliable evidence of student learning, and AI detectors that examine only the finished product are inaccurate and ethically contentious. Process data offers an alternative, but prior work covers only English essay writing. We ask whether AI assistance carries a temporal signature, whether it generalizes from writing to programming, and whether it distinguishes ordinary collaboration from wholesale delegation. We analyze three public corpora: CoAuthor (1,447 keystroke-level co-writing sessions), RealHumanEval (editor telemetry from 243 programmer records), and a pre-LLM CS1 corpus (5.1 million keystrokes) as a human-only baseline, comparing minimal-AI work, collaborative AI use, and simulated wholesale delegation. Three findings emerge. First, the signature generalizes: AI contributions arrive in bursts far outside the author's own baseline in both mediums (paired d_z = 1.13 and 3.54). Second, engagement diverges by medium: 93% of AI-inserted characters survived to writers' final documents, while only 14% of accepted code suggestions survived intact. Third, classifiers using only observable temporal features separate simulated delegation from authentic work nearly perfectly (F1 $\geq$ 0.997; at most 0.5% of real work misclassified), while ordinary collaboration remains hard to distinguish from unassisted work. Temporal evidence flags wholesale delegation rather than assistance, positioning process visibility as a candidate evidentiary basis for academic integrity, pending validation in authentic coursework.

Tue 15 SeptHuman-Computer InteractionArtificial Intelligence
The gist
It can be hard to tell if people used AI tools too much just by looking at their finished writing or code. This paper finds that the timing of how people type or accept AI help leaves a kind of fingerprint that can show if AI did most of the work. The researchers studied writing and programming and showed that bursts of AI-generated content happen in clear time patterns. Their method can detect when someone mostly lets AI do their work, which could help keep things fair in schools and other places.
Open → 2609.17883v1