@inproceedings{liu-etal-2026-dmhm,
    title = "{DMHM}: Density-aware Manifold Learning and Hybrid Mahalanobis Energy for {LLM}s-generated Text Detection",
    author = "Liu, Tianle  and
      Tian, Zhiliang  and
      Huang, Zhen  and
      Liu, Tianlun  and
      Huang, Jingyuan  and
      Zhang, Zhaoning  and
      Shao, Chengcheng  and
      Li, Dongsheng",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.180/",
    pages = "3906--3929",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-390-6",
    abstract = "As the text generated by large language models (LLMs) increasingly resembles human-written text (HWT), detecting LLM-generated text (LGT) is crucial to avoid malicious use of LGT. Recent research treats LGT detection as an out-of-distribution (OOD) detection problem and views HWT as the OOD. However, existing OOD detection methods assume that LGT is a single homogeneous distribution. In practice, LGT exhibits different characteristics under different generation conditions. Text from weaker LLMs tends to form distinct clusters and is easy to detect, whereas text from stronger models significantly overlaps with HWTs and is hard to detect. To address the issue, in this paper, we propose an LGT detection framework based on density-aware manifold learning and the construction of hybrid Mahalanobis energy. We apply density-aware manifold learning with Laplacian smoothness and density regularization in embedding space, amplifying differences between LGT and HWT. We further propose a density-adaptive hybrid Mahalanobis metric that combines global and local covariance via density weighting, enabling adaptation to the manifold-aware embedding space. Finally, based on the metric, we define the distribution energy as a measure of distribution discrepancy, and we employ energy learning and contrastive learning to separate distributions hierarchically, establishing a clear OOD decision boundary. Experiments show that our method outperforms strong baselines."
}