MixDetect: Word-Level Localization and Quantification of AI Editing

Hongrui Bao, Yubing Ren, Zhendong Pan, Fang Fang, Shi Wang +1

Large language models are increasingly used to edit human-written text rather than generate entire texts from scratch. Conventional AI-text detectors mainly distinguish human-written from fully AI-generated text, while recent methods for AI-edited text typically provide only a text-level label or editing-degree score. We introduce MixDetect, a word-level framework for localizing and quantifying AI editing. MixDetect separately predicts whether each word has been edited and, conditional on editing, how substantial the edit is, allowing editing scope and editing intensity to be estimated separately. During training, source--edited pairs are aligned to construct word-level supervision, while inference requires only the input text. Experiments show that MixDetect accurately localizes AI-edited words, reflects differences in editing intensity, and reveals different scope--intensity patterns across editing degrees and operations. The overall AI editing magnitude increases under additional AI editing, decreases when AI-generated text is edited by humans, and remains nearly unchanged under ordinary human-to-human editing. The aggregated text-level predictions also perform well on binary…