T5-CSBoost: Adversarial Perturbation Resistant LLM Fingerprinting

Abstract

While many AI-generated text (AIGT) detectors achieve strong performance on clean inputs, their accuracy degrades significantly under light paraphrasing, word substitutions, character edits, and distribution shifts. We present T5 Contrastive Style Boosted Classifier (T5-CSBoost), an extension to the T5-Sentinel framework that keeps the original next-token prediction objective for source attribution while introducing an auxiliary margin-based triplet loss over decoder embeddings. This contrastive style regularization encourages the learning of compact, perturbation-resistant stylistic representations, offering a lightweight yet effective alternative to prior approaches that rely on architectural modifications, adversarial training, or complex multi-task objectives without altering the underlying T5-small backbone. T5-CSBoost achieves state-of-the-art multiclass source attribution and binary human-vs-LLM detection on OpenLLMText and HC3 AIGT benchmarks. More importantly, T5-CSBoost demonstrates enhanced robustness to word and character level adversarial perturbations of up to 90% intensity, achieving state-of-the-art on the challenging MAGE/Deepfake stress-test suite, including unseen models, unseen domains, and extreme paraphrasing scenarios. Our results highlight that explicitly regularizing stylistic embeddings via contrastive learning is a practical and effective strategy for building more robust LLM fingerprinting systems in real-world adversarial settings.