arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

Amplifying, Not Learning: The Price of Out-of-Distribution Generalization in AI-Text Detection

The paper shows that AI‑text detectors, rather than learning a clear AI‑versus‑human boundary, amplify an inherited predictability axis that already exists in language models. This amplification causes detectors to over‑flag fluent, formal human writing while missing high‑temperature AI outputs, and the bias persists across languages, code, and detector architectures. A training‑free operator can relocate the bias but cannot erase it, underscoring that the unfairness is a structural cost of out‑of‑distribution generalization.

By Alexander Smirnov
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 17

English Word Sense Disambiguation in 2026: When the Labels Become the Bottleneck

The paper reports that in English all‑words word sense disambiguation (WSD), the scarcity of high‑quality labels—not the models—has become the limiting factor. The authors introduce lexEN, a human‑adjudicated correction layer over the Maru2022 ALL_NEW benchmark, and SenseBench, a living leaderboard for LLM WSD evaluation. They show that frontier large language models reach about 95 % accuracy on lexEN‑v1, that relabeling corpora with these models improves downstream systems, and that fine‑grained WordNet senses are often ill‑posed, with coarsening improving both annotator agreement and model performance. "whyItMatters":"The study highlights that improving label quality and managing annotation costs are now the critical challenges for advancing WSD performance, as model accuracy is already near its theoretical ceiling."

By Vassili Philippov, Amro Salman, Dmitrii Andreev, Penny Hands, Emil Kaiumov, Pavel Katunin, Anton Nikolaev