MELD: Multi-Task Equilibrated Learning Detector for AI-Generated Text

arXiv:2605.06903v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models are widely used in everyday writing, making reliable AI-generated text detection crucial for academic integrity, content moderation, and provenance tracking. Yet high AUROC on clean, in-distribution benchmarks is not sufficient. Practical detectors must resist adversarial rewrites, generalize to unseen generators and writing domains, and maintain low false-positive rates (FPR). A pooled AI-versus-human objective does not explicitly require the model to distinguish among generator families, so it may fail to learn the generator-specific structure needed for generalization and attribution. We introduce MELD (Multi-Task Equilibrated Learning Detector), which instead trains on class-balanced, family-specific AI-versus-human tasks while sharing a common representation of human writing. MELD produces detection, generator-family, rewrite-task, and token-level predictions in a single forward pass. Format normalization further makes its scores invariant to the modeled reformatting operations. MELD ranks first among open-source submissions in the public RAID leaderboard and matches or exceeds supervised baselines on five of six held-out evaluation pools. To evaluate transfer to unseen generators, we introduce MELD-eval, a held-out test pool built from four frontier chat models. Without further fine-tuning, MELD achieves 99.7% TPR at 1% FPR on MELD-eval and 98% TPR at the same FPR on a held-out generator whose family is absent from training. Finally, in a case study of 5.9 million scientific texts from 2016--2026, MELD's prediction scores remain stable through 2022 and increase from 2023 onward, coinciding with the widespread adoption of LLM-based writing tools. The model, MELD-eval pool, source code, and live demo are available.