# A Unified Detection Framework for AI-Related Content and Artifacts

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07527 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.07527/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Watermarking generated content and models, one of 12 directions in LLM safety and security.
- Builds on 24 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Jul 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM safety and security / [Watermarking generated content and models](https://mlsanity.com/safety/watermarking-generated-content-and-models/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6572/) (2014)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07258/) (2021)
- [Towards Evaluating the Robustness of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.04644/) (2016)
- [Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12712/) (2023)
- [Survey of Hallucination in Natural Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03629/) (2022)
- [Adversarial examples in the physical world](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.02533/) (2016)
- [A Simple Unified Framework for Detecting Out-of-Distribution Samples and Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03888/) (2018)
- [DeepFool: a simple and accurate method to fool deep neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.04599/) (2015)
- [SelfCheckGPT: Zero-Resource Black-Box Hallucination Detection for Generative Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08896/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Release Strategies and the Social Impacts of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09203/) (2019)
- [GLTR: Statistical Detection and Visualization of Generated Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.04043/) (2019)
- [How Close is ChatGPT to Human Experts? Comparison Corpus, Evaluation, and Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.07597/) (2023)
- [HaluEval: A Large-Scale Hallucination Evaluation Benchmark for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11747/) (2023)
- [Characterizing Adversarial Subspaces Using Local Intrinsic Dimensionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.02613/) (2018)
- [Automatic Detection of Generated Text is Easiest when Humans are Fooled](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00650/) (2019)
- [On Detecting Adversarial Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.04267/) (2017)
- [Diffusion-Based Adversarial Sample Generation for Improved Stealthiness and Controllability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16494/) (2023)
- [A Statistical Framework of Watermarks for Large Language Models: Pivot, Detection Efficiency and Optimal Rules](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01245/) (2024)
- [The Cellwise Minimum Covariance Determinant Estimator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.13493/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a double-edged sword: while it has achieved remarkable success across a wide range of domains, its deployment also calls for effective oversight and regulation, for which the detection of AI-related content and artifacts is perhaps the most direct and cost-effective approach. To this end, we propose a unified detection framework based on Mahalanobis distance scores (MDS), applicable to several important settings, including the detection of large language model (LLM) generated text, hallucination, watermark, and adversarial examples. A key component of the proposed method is to accurately characterize the positive class--such as human-generated text, factual statements, unwatermarked text, or non-adversarial samples--which requires an efficient and robust estimator of the covariance matrix of deep representations of positive samples before computing the MDS. Since the positive samples typically consist of multiple classes, and these classes may exhibit both homogeneity and heterogeneity, we develop joint estimation methods for both the casewise and cellwise minimum covariance determinant (MCD) estimators. We provide efficient optimization algorithms for both estimators and prove their convergence. We provide a reasonable definition of the breakdown point for the joint estimators and prove their corresponding high breakdown point properties. Empirical evaluations confirm the effectiveness of the proposed detection framework.