English

Segmenting Human-LLM Co-authored Text via Change Point Detection

Computation and Language 2026-05-06 v1 Artificial Intelligence Methodology

Abstract

The rise of large language models (LLMs) has created an urgent need to distinguish between human-written and LLM-generated text to ensure authenticity and societal trust. Existing detectors typically provide a binary classification for an entire passage; however, this is insufficient for human--LLM co-authored text, where the objective is to localize specific segments authored by humans or LLMs. To bridge this gap, we propose algorithms to segment text into human- and LLM-authored pieces. Our key observation is that such a segmentation task is conceptually similar to classical change point detection in time-series analysis. Leveraging this analogy, we adapt change point detection to LLM-generated text detection, develop a weighted algorithm and a generalized algorithm to accommodate heterogeneous detection score variability, and establish the minimax optimality of our procedure. Empirically, we demonstrate the strong performance of our approach against a wide range of existing baselines.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.03723,
  title  = {Segmenting Human-LLM Co-authored Text via Change Point Detection},
  author = {Mengchu Li and Jin Zhu and Jinglai Li and Chengchun Shi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.03723},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T12:50:47.217Z