Juan Villate Lemus
2026
LAFED at SemEval-2026 Task 13: Language-Agnostic Feature Engineering for Cross-Lingual AI-Generated Code Detection
Juan Villate Lemus
Proceedings of the 20th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (2026)
Juan Villate Lemus
Proceedings of the 20th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (2026)
Robust detection of AI-generated source code across programming languages remains challenging due to language-specific cues and train–test distribution shifts. We present LAFED (Language-Agnostic Feature Engineering Detector), a feature-engineering approach trained on {Python, Java, C++} and evaluated on a multilingual test set that includes unseen languages {C, C#, Go, JavaScript, PHP}. LAFED combines (i) structural skeletal features (indentation, control-flow density, and approximations of McCabe/Halstead complexity), (ii) character and whitespace statistics inspired by stylometry, and (iii) micro-style patterns (operator spacing, blank lines, indentation consistency). Using XGBoost (Chen and Guestrin, 2016) with Optuna hyperparameter search (Akiba et al., 2019), our best model achieves macro-F1=0.7570 on a 1,000-sample test set; the official submission obtains macro-F1=0.75209 (5th place in Subtask A). Per-language analysis shows strong transfer to C# (0.7753) and JavaScript (0.7683), but weaker performance on Go (0.6400) and PHP (0.5238).