# DETree: DEtecting Human-AI Collaborative Texts via Tree-Structured Hierarchical Representation Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.17489 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.17489/

## Key facts

- Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 70 of its 86 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 70)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12948/) (2025)
- [Qwen2.5 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15115/) (2024)
- [OPT: Open Pre-trained Transformer Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01068/) (2022)
- [Constitutional AI: Harmlessness from AI Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08073/) (2022)
- [Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11416/) (2022)
- [XLNet: Generalized Autoregressive Pretraining for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08237/) (2019)
- [Gemma 2: Improving Open Language Models at a Practical Size](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00118/) (2024)
- [BLOOM: A 176B-Parameter Open-Access Multilingual Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05100/) (2022)
- [Gemma 3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19786/) (2025)
- [Multitask Prompted Training Enables Zero-Shot Task Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08207/) (2021)
- [PaLM 2 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10403/) (2023)
- [DeepSeek-V2: A Strong, Economical, and Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.04434/) (2024)
- [ChatGLM: A Family of Large Language Models from GLM-130B to GLM-4 All Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12793/) (2024)
- [Cross-lingual Language Model Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07291/) (2019)
- [GLM-130B: An Open Bilingual Pre-trained Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02414/) (2022)
- [CTRL: A Conditional Transformer Language Model for Controllable Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05858/) (2019)
- [DetectGPT: Zero-Shot Machine-Generated Text Detection using Probability Curvature](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11305/) (2023)
- [A Watermark for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.10226/) (2023)
- [OLMo: Accelerating the Science of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00838/) (2024)
- [Defending Against Neural Fake News](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.12616/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [StoryScope: Investigating idiosyncrasies in AI fiction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.03136/) (2026)
- [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)
- [MAGA-Bench: Machine-Augment-Generated Text via Alignment Detection Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.04633/) (2026)
- [Operation-Guided Progressive Human-to-AI Text Transformation Benchmark for Multi-Granularity AI-Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.06481/) (2026)
- [Hitting a Moving Target: Test-Time Adaptation for AI Text Detection under Continual Distribution Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.25152/) (2026)
- [Once a Response, Always a Response: Detecting LLM-generated Text via Latent Prompt Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.05741/) (2026)
- [Exons-Detect: Identifying and Amplifying Exonic Tokens via Hidden-State Discrepancy for Robust AI-Generated Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.24981/) (2026)
- [Multi-Level Contextual Token Relation Modeling for Machine-Generated Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.16107/) (2026)
- [Hidden Human-Like Nature of Machine-Generated Texts: Theory and Detection Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.23190/) (2026)
- [DWT-Fusion: A Signal-Based Framework for Training-Free LLM-Generated Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.22026/) (2026)
- [D2C-Routing: Dimension-to-Composition Evidence Routing for Mixed-Origin AI-Generated Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.27380/) (2026)
- [LA-CPD: Local-Evidence-Aware Change-Point Detection for Human-LLM Authorship Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.33787/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Detecting AI-involved text is essential for combating misinformation, plagiarism, and academic misconduct. However, AI text generation includes diverse collaborative processes (AI-written text edited by humans, human-written text edited by AI, and AI-generated text refined by other AI), where various or even new LLMs could be involved. Texts generated through these varied processes exhibit complex characteristics, presenting significant challenges for detection. Current methods model these processes rather crudely, primarily employing binary classification (purely human vs. AI-involved) or multi-classification (treating human-AI collaboration as a new class). We observe that representations of texts generated through different processes exhibit inherent clustering relationships. Therefore, we propose DETree, a novel approach that models the relationships among different processes as a Hierarchical Affinity Tree structure, and introduces a specialized loss function that aligns text representations with this tree. To facilitate this learning, we developed RealBench, a comprehensive benchmark dataset that automatically incorporates a wide spectrum of hybrid texts produced through various human-AI collaboration processes. Our method improves performance in hybrid text detection tasks and significantly enhances robustness and generalization in out-of-distribution scenarios, particularly in few-shot learning conditions, further demonstrating the promise of training-based approaches in OOD settings. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/heyongxin233/DETree.