D&R: Recovery-based AI-Generated Text Detection via a Single Black-box LLM Call

Yuxia Sun, Ran Zhang, Aoxiang Sun, Xu Li, Zitao Liu, Jingcai Guo

International Conference on Learning Representations 2026 (ICLR 2026) Conference

Large language models (LLMs) generate increasingly human-like text, raising concerns about misinformation and authenticity. Detecting AI-generated text remains challenging: existing methods often underperform, especially on short texts, require probability access unavailable in real-world black-box settings, incur high costs from multiple calls, or fail to generalize across models. We propose Disrupt-and-Recover (D&R), a recovery-based detection framework grounded in posterior concentration. D&R disrupts text via model-free Within-Chunk Shuffling, performs a single black-box LLM recovery, and measures semantic–structural recovery similarity as a proxy for concentration. This design ensures efficiency, black-box practicality, and is theoretically supported under the concentration assumption. Extensive experiments across four datasets and six source models show that D&R achieves state-of-the-art performance, with AUROC 0.96 on long texts and 0.87 on short texts, surpassing the strongest baseline by +0.08 and +0.14. D&R further remains robust under source–recovery mismatch and model variation. Our code and data is available at https://github.com/Yuxia-Sun/D-R.