Analyzing Code Provenance in LLMs for Programming Education

Subhankar Maity, Faiza Belbachir, Omar Boucelma, Guilherme Medeiros Machado

Large language models (LLMs) play an increasing role in programming education, challenging traditional assessment methods as they can generate fully functional code instantly. This disrupts the reliability of student submissions as indicators of learning and effort. To address this issue, code provenance is essential for tracing the origins of code and distinguishing student-authored, AI-generated, and externally sourced components. We extend the Min-K% probability approach by incorporating synthetic non-member code generation and apply it to Python code for membership inference and provenance tracking. Evaluations cover free LLMs such as GPT-2, DistilGPT-2, and DialoGPT, as well as state-of-the-art commercial models including GPT-5, Gemini 2.5, Mistral, DeepSeek, and LLaMA 3.3. Before evaluating our approach on higher-education student assignments, we validate its feasibility using Stack Overflow data. The results show that free models enable more sensitive code memorization detection than commercial models. By systematically comparing these LLMs, we assess trade-offs between detection accuracy and privacy protection, taking an initial step toward effective assessment of…