Towards Structurally Explainable Machine-Generated Text Detection: A Graph-Perspective Framework

Abstract

Despite the success of machine-generated text detectors, the black-box nature remains a critical limitation. Traditional explainability methods rely on token-level saliency, insufficient to reveal the high-order structural dependencies that distinguish LLM outputs. In this paper, we propose \textsc{LM$^2$otifs}, a principled framework that shifts detection from linear sequences to graph-structured manifolds. We first provide a theoretical grounding based on probabilistic graphical models, demonstrating that detection performance is more distinguishable in the graph-topological space. Driven by this theory, \textsc{LM$^2$otifs} transforms text into lexical co-occurrence graphs to preserve latent structural fingerprints. The framework employs Graph Neural Networks for robust detection and utilizes graph-specific explainers to extract interpretable motifs. Crucially, our experiments reveal that these structural motifs achieve higher faithfulness compared to traditional methods. This empirical evidence confirms the existence of high-order structural explanations that linear methods fail to capture. Experimental results show that \textsc{LM$^2$otifs} achieves state-of-the-art performance while providing multi-level \textit{distinct linguistic fingerprints} that are more faithful to the model's decision.