AEyeDE: An Attention-Based Attribution Framework for AI-Generated Text Detection

Abstract: Detecting AI-generated text is becoming increasingly challenging as modern language models approach human-level fluency and can evade detectors that rely on surface statistics or likelihood-based signals. We propose AEyeDE, an attribution-driven approach to human-AI authorship detection that leverages model attention as a discriminative signal. Specifically, we extract attention-based attribution matrices for both human- and AI-generated text using a proxy Transformer model with white-box access and train a lightweight Convolutional Neural Network to learn representations from these attribution maps. Across encoder-decoder translation settings, our method consistently outperforms a text-only baseline. In decoder-only settings, it performs strongly in generator-specific detection, remains competitive on standard benchmarks, and shows robustness under cross-dataset transfer and alternative-spelling perturbations. We further show that attention maps exhibit recurring local structures whose relative frequencies differ consistently between human- and AI-generated text across datasets and proxy models. These findings suggest that attention-based attribution maps provide a complementary and interpretable signal for AI-generated text detection. We will make the code publicly available to support future research.

Submission Type: Long submission (more than 12 pages of main content)

Assigned Action Editor: ~Tianbao_Yang1

Submission Number: 8276