AI サービスが一時的に利用できないため、復旧後に翻訳を補完します。
[Submitted on 8 Sep 2026] Title:A Mechanistic Study of AI-Text Detection Neurons in Frozen BERT: Sparse Probing and Activation Patching on RAID View a PDF of the paper titled A Mechanistic Study of AI-Text Detection Neurons in Frozen BERT: Sparse Probing and Activation Patching on RAID, by Pawe{\l} Blicharz and 1 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:AI-generated text detectors achieve high accuracy on standard benchmarks, yet the internal representations that drive these predictions remain poorly understood. We study which neurons in a frozen BERT-base-uncased encoder support AI-text detection, using the RAID benchmark across six generators spanning pure-base and instruction-tuned models. We apply the L1-to-L2 sparse-probing protocol of Gurnee et al. (2023) to all 9,216 CLS hidden-state dimensions (12 layers x 768), which we call neurons. The procedure recovers a stable set of under 1% of neurons per generator, consistent across folds and seeds; a probe restricted to that set retains most of the full-feature detection accuracy. Bidirectional activation patching confirms this set's causal relevance: in both directions it flips predictions an order of magnitude more often than size-matched random sets. Mean-ablating the same neurons leaves accuracy largely intact; the signal is therefore redundantly distributed. Cross-generator analysis reveals a bipartite structure: instruction-tuned generators concentrate 30-36% of stable neurons in BERT's final layer while both base generators fall below 14%, consistent with a layer-12 footprint of post-training alignment. Leave-one-family-out evaluation shows the selected neurons retain 86-94% of the full-feature ceiling on unseen generator families, so a detector can operate on a small fixed subspace without re-identifying neurons per generator. Comments: Accepted to EMNLP 2026 (Main Conference) Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) ACM classes: I.2.7 Cite as: arXiv:2609.30287 [cs.CL] (or arXiv:2609.30287v1 [cs.CL] for this version) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.30287 arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite Submission history From: Paweł Blicharz [view email] [v1] Tue, 8 Sep 2026 17:52:12 UTC (80 KB) Full-text links: Access Paper: View a PDF of the paper titled A Mechanistic Study of AI-Text Detection Neurons in Frozen BERT: Sparse Probing and Activation Patching on RAID, by Pawe{\l} Blicharz and 1 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) TeX Source view license Current browse context: cs.CL new | recent | 2026-09 Change to browse by: cs cs.AI References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Loading... Data provided by: Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article alphaXiv Toggle alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?) Links to Code Toggle CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?) DagsHub Toggle DagsHub (What is DagsHub?) GotitPub Toggle Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?) Huggingface Toggle Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?) ScienceCast Toggle ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?) Demos Demos Replicate Toggle Replicate (What is Replicate?) Spaces Toggle Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?) Spaces Toggle TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?) Related Papers Recommenders and Search Tools Link to Influence Flower Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?) Core recommender toggle CORE Recommender (What is CORE?) Author Venue Institution Topic About arXivLabs arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website. Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them. Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs. Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)