Span-level Detection of AI-generated Scientific Text via Contrastive Learning and Structural Calibration

Abstract: The rapid adoption of LLMs in scientific writing raises serious concerns regarding authorship integrity and the reliability of scholarly publications. Existing detection approaches mainly rely on document-level classification or surface-level statistical cues; however, they neglect fine-grained span localization, exhibit weak calibration, and often fail to generalize across disciplines and generators. To address these limitations, we present Sci-SpanDet, a structure-aware framework for detecting AI-generated scholarly texts. The proposed method combines section-conditioned stylistic modeling with multi-level contrastive learning to capture nuanced human-AI differences while mitigating topic dependence, thereby enhancing cross-domain robustness. In addition, it integrates BIO-CRF sequence labeling with pointer-based boundary decoding and confidence calibration to enable precise span-level detection and reliable probability estimates. Extensive experiments on a newly constructed cross-disciplinary dataset of 100,000 annotated samples generated by multiple LLM families (GPT, Qwen, DeepSeek, LLaMA) demonstrate that Sci-SpanDet achieves state-of-the-art performance, with F1(AI) of 80.17, AUROC of 92.63, and Span-F1 of 74.36. Furthermore, it shows strong resilience under adversarial rewriting and maintains balanced accuracy across IMRaD sections and diverse disciplines, substantially surpassing existing baselines. To ensure reproducibility and to foster further research on AI-generated text detection in scholarly documents, the curated dataset and source code will be publicly released upon publication.