TeamOmega at SemEval-2026 Task 13: Frozen vs. Trainable Representations for Out-of-Distribution AI-Generated Code Detection: A CodeBERT Fine-Tuning Study

Nahid Niyaz Shovon, Md. Naim Parvez


Abstract
We propose a CodeBERT-based system for detecting AI-generated code under severe cross-language and cross-domain distribution shift. Our approach conducts a controlled comparison between a fully frozen backbone and a partially fine-tuned configuration that unfreezes only the final transformer layer with discriminative learning rates. While partial fine-tuning substantially improves in-domain performance, the frozen backbone demonstrates stronger robustness under out-of-distribution evaluation. Our results highlight a trade-off between task adaptation and cross-language generalization in machine-generated code detection.
Anthology ID:
2026.semeval-1.255
Volume:
Proceedings of the 20th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (2026)
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, USA
Editors:
Ekaterina Kochmar, Debanjan Ghosh, Kai North, Mamoru Komachi
Venues:
SemEval | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2034–2039
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.semeval-1.255/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Nahid Niyaz Shovon and Md. Naim Parvez. 2026. TeamOmega at SemEval-2026 Task 13: Frozen vs. Trainable Representations for Out-of-Distribution AI-Generated Code Detection: A CodeBERT Fine-Tuning Study. In Proceedings of the 20th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (2026), pages 2034–2039, San Diego, California, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
TeamOmega at SemEval-2026 Task 13: Frozen vs. Trainable Representations for Out-of-Distribution AI-Generated Code Detection: A CodeBERT Fine-Tuning Study (Shovon & Parvez, SemEval 2026)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.semeval-1.255.pdf
Supplementarymaterial:
 2026.semeval-1.255.SupplementaryMaterial.tex