# Cross-Prompt Generalization in Detecting AI-Generated Fake News Using Interpretable Linguistic Features

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.04199 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.04199/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [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)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [DetectGPT: Zero-Shot Machine-Generated Text Detection using Probability Curvature](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11305/) (2023)
- [GLTR: Statistical Detection and Visualization of Generated Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.04043/) (2019)
- [Fake News Detection on Social Media: A Data Mining Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.01967/) (2017)
- [Automatic Detection of Generated Text is Easiest when Humans are Fooled](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00650/) (2019)
- [Crowdsourcing a Word-Emotion Association Lexicon](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1308.6297/) (2013)
- [Ensemble Survival Analysis for Preclinical Cognitive Decline Prediction in Alzheimer's Disease Using Longitudinal Biomarkers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16645/) (2025)
- [Human vs. Machine Deception: Distinguishing AI-Generated and Human-Written Fake News Using Ensemble Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.09960/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The increasing use of large language models has raised concerns about the spread of AI-generated fake news, particularly under varying prompting strategies. Most existing detection models are trained and evaluated under a single generation setting, leaving their ability to generalize across unseen prompts unclear. In this study, we investigate cross-prompt generalization in fake news detection using three datasets of AI-generated articles produced under distinct prompts, combined with real news articles. We extract interpretable linguistic features capturing lexical diversity, readability, and emotion-based characteristics and evaluate a random forest classifier under a cross-prompt framework, where models trained on one prompt are tested on another. Across all six train-test combinations, performance remains consistently high, with AUC values ranging from 0.988 to 1.000. Analysis of feature distributions shows that AI-generated text exhibits increased lexical diversity, reduced readability, and substantially lower emotional intensity compared to the overall dataset, with variations across prompts. Despite these distributional shifts, the classifier maintains strong performance, indicating that these features capture stable properties of AI-generated text that generalize across prompting strategies. These findings suggest that feature-based approaches can provide robust detection of AI-generated fake news under prompt variability.