# Towards Automatic Boundary Detection for Human-AI Collaborative Hybrid Essay in Education

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.12267 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.12267/

## Key facts

- Cited by 17 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Jul 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Prototypical Networks for Few-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.05175/) (2017)
- [FaceNet: A Unified Embedding for Face Recognition and Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03832/) (2015)
- [RealToxicityPrompts: Evaluating Neural Toxic Degeneration in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.11462/) (2020)
- [Ethical and social risks of harm from Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04359/) (2021)
- [DetectGPT: Zero-Shot Machine-Generated Text Detection using Probability Curvature](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11305/) (2023)
- [Defending Against Neural Fake News](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.12616/) (2019)
- [Persistent Anti-Muslim Bias in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.05783/) (2021)
- [All That's 'Human' Is Not Gold: Evaluating Human Evaluation of Generated Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00061/) (2021)
- [Automatic Detection of Generated Text is Easiest when Humans are Fooled](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00650/) (2019)
- [CoAuthor: Designing a Human-AI Collaborative Writing Dataset for Exploring Language Model Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.06796/) (2022)
- [Automatic Detection of Machine Generated Text: A Critical Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.01314/) (2020)
- [TweepFake: about Detecting Deepfake Tweets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.00036/) (2020)
- [Real or Fake Text?: Investigating Human Ability to Detect Boundaries Between Human-Written and Machine-Generated Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.12672/) (2022)
- [The Impact of Multiple Parallel Phrase Suggestions on Email Input and Composition Behaviour of Native and Non-Native English Writers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.09157/) (2021)
- [A Survey on Contextual Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07278/) (2020)
- [Translating Radiology Reports into Plain Language using ChatGPT and GPT-4 with Prompt Learning: Promising Results, Limitations, and Potential](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09038/) (2023)
- [Evaluation of sentence embeddings in downstream and linguistic probing tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.06259/) (2018)
- [Hierarchical Heterogeneous Graph Representation Learning for Short Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.00180/) (2021)
- [Feature-Level Debiased Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05421/) (2022)
- [Towards Understanding and Detecting Fake Reviews in App Stores](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12607/) (2019)
- [AGI: Artificial General Intelligence for Education](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12479/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Sociotechnical Safety Evaluation of Generative AI Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11986/) (2023)
- [CollabStory: Multi-LLM Collaborative Story Generation and Authorship Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12665/) (2024)
- [Detecting AI-Generated Sentences in Human-AI Collaborative Hybrid Texts: Challenges, Strategies, and Insights](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03506/) (2024)
- [Almost AI, Almost Human: The Challenge of Detecting AI-Polished Writing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.15666/) (2025)
- [DETree: DEtecting Human-AI Collaborative Texts via Tree-Structured Hierarchical Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.17489/) (2025)
- [SCAR: Data Selection via Style Consistency-Aware Response Ranking for Efficient Instruction-Tuning of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10882/) (2024)
- [DAMASHA: Detecting AI in Mixed Adversarial Texts via Segmentation with Human-interpretable Attribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.04838/) (2025)
- [DeepPavlov at SemEval-2024 Task 8: Leveraging Transfer Learning for Detecting Boundaries of Machine-Generated Texts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.10629/) (2024)
- [GigaCheck: Detecting LLM-generated Content via Object-Centric Span Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23728/) (2024)
- [Beyond the Final Actor: Modeling the Dual Roles of Creator and Editor for Fine-Grained LLM-Generated Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.04932/) (2026)
- ['Your AI Text is not Mine': Redefining and Evaluating AI-generated Text Detection under Realistic Assumptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.04906/) (2026)
- [Advacheck at GenAI Detection Task 1: AI Detection Powered by Domain-Aware Multi-Tasking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.11736/) (2024)
- [Kill two birds with one stone: generalized and robust AI-generated text detection via dynamic perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.21019/) (2025)
- [LLMTrace: A Corpus for Classification and Fine-Grained Localization of AI-Written Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21269/) (2025)
- [Self-Disguise Attack: Induce the LLM to disguise itself for AIGT detection evasion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.15848/) (2025)
- [Detecting LLM-Generated Tokens in Human--LLM Coauthored Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.21458/) (2026)
- [LA-CPD: Local-Evidence-Aware Change-Point Detection for Human-LLM Authorship Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.33787/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The recent large language models (LLMs), e.g., ChatGPT, have been able to generate human-like and fluent responses when provided with specific instructions. While admitting the convenience brought by technological advancement, educators also have concerns that students might leverage LLMs to complete their writing assignments and pass them off as their original work. Although many AI content detection studies have been conducted as a result of such concerns, most of these prior studies modeled AI content detection as a classification problem, assuming that a text is either entirely human-written or entirely AI-generated. In this study, we investigated AI content detection in a rarely explored yet realistic setting where the text to be detected is collaboratively written by human and generative LLMs (i.e., hybrid text). We first formalized the detection task as identifying the transition points between human-written content and AI-generated content from a given hybrid text (boundary detection). Then we proposed a two-step approach where we (1) separated AI-generated content from human-written content during the encoder training process; and (2) calculated the distances between every two adjacent prototypes and assumed that the boundaries exist between the two adjacent prototypes that have the furthest distance from each other. Through extensive experiments, we observed the following main findings: (1) the proposed approach consistently outperformed the baseline methods across different experiment settings; (2) the encoder training process can significantly boost the performance of the proposed approach; (3) when detecting boundaries for single-boundary hybrid essays, the proposed approach could be enhanced by adopting a relatively large prototype size, leading to a 22% improvement in the In-Domain evaluation and an 18% improvement in the Out-of-Domain evaluation.