StealthRL: Reinforcement Learning Paraphrase Attacks for Multi-Detector Evasion of AI-Text Detectors

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Authors: Suraj Ranganath, Atharv Ramesh
Cited by: 0

Abstract

AI-text detectors are increasingly used in high-stakes settings, but their robustness to meaning-preserving adversarial rewriting remains unclear. We introduce StealthRL, a reinforcement learning framework for stress-testing detectors with adaptive paraphrase attacks. StealthRL trains a paraphrase policy against a detector ensemble while enforcing semantic fidelity, then evaluates transfer to held-out detector families on the full filtered MAGE test pool. Across RoBERTa, Fast-DetectGPT, Binoculars, and MAGE, the resulting attack sharply degrades detection performance, driving mean TPR@1%FPR down to 0.024 while retaining nontrivial semantic overlap and readable prose. The attack also transfers to detectors not used during training, indicating a broader robustness failure rather than overfitting to a single target model. We complement the main results with detector-score analysis, repeated-generation stability checks, and automatic and judge-based quality evaluation. Our findings suggest that current AI-text detectors remain brittle under adaptive paraphrasing pressure and motivate robustness evaluation at deployment-relevant operating points. Our code and the trained model checkpoint are publicly available.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Adversarial Robustness in Machine Learning Digital Media Forensic Detection Spam and Phishing Detection

Publication details

Journal / source
arXiv (Cornell University)
Publication date
9 February 2026
Language
EN
Document type
Preprint