AI-generated-text detectors are evaluated as classifiers, yet consequential deployments use detector outputs as evidence that people inspect, trust, contest, or use to escalate decisions. We call this mismatch the classification–evidence gap. The gap makes scalar detector scores a weak deployment interface: they hide the basis of a judgment, invite overtrust, and can turn false positives into accusations. We argue that AI-text detection should be evaluated as evidence-grounded decision support rather than as authorship proof. We introduce AGENT-XTrust, a guideline-expert detector that returns direct MetaAgent labels without target-domain scalar-cutoff calibration and converts each document-level judgment into inspectable evidence records containing local labels, rationales, confidence estimates, and linked spans. Across three domains and four generators, AGENT-XTrust preserves strong binary accuracy while producing inspectable, contestable evidence. In a controlled fixed-stimulus user study, participants assigned to the full AGENT-XTrust system-and-interface package achieved 19.8 and 11.3 points higher decision accuracy than those assigned to the score-only and score-plus-explanation packages, respectively; overtrust on each condition’s detector-wrong cases was 17.8 and 18.3 points lower. These results suggest a broader evaluation target for AI-text detection: not only whether a detector is correct, but whether complete detector-and-evidence packages support reliable human decisions under uncertainty.

Understanding financial documents is critical for high-stakes decision-making yet hindered by systemic semantic implicitness: key facts are rarely explicit in surface text and often determined by global structural cues. Missing these cues invites semantic misinterpretations, such as misreading what a number refers to, an outcome unacceptable in high-stakes environments. However, existing Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems typically treat structure as a physical navigational skeleton rather than intrinsic semantic knowledge. To address this, we introduce Fin-STAR (Financial STructure-As-Semantics Retrieval), a framework redefining hierarchy as intrinsic semantics. Fin-STAR incorporates a novel Structure-Enriched Semantic Indexing mechanism that augments the hierarchical lineage with snippet-derived virtual nodes, and injects this enriched context via a semantic cross-attention paradigm, rendering implicit cues explicit. By grounding evidence within its structural scope, we preserve factual invariance and ensure contextual integrity. Addressing the lack of granular public datasets, we conduct experiments on FinTierQA Gold, a curated expert benchmark. Results show that Fin-STAR outperforms state-of-the-art hierarchical and graph-based baselines across diverse query complexities, document types, and markets. Notably, ablations confirm that our semantic injection consistently outperforms alternative strategies. Finally, we release FinTierQA, comprising 3.9M pairs automatically constructed from 78k documents via our framework .

The integration of documents generated by LLMs themselves (Self-Docs) alongside retrieved documents has emerged as a promising strategy for retrieval-augmented generation systems. However, previous research primarily focuses on optimizing the use of Self-Docs, with their inherent properties remaining underexplored. To bridge this gap, we first investigate the overall effectiveness of Self-Docs, identifying key factors that shape their contribution to RAG performance (RQ1). Building on these insights, we develop a taxonomy grounded in Systemic Functional Linguistics to compare the influence of various Self-Docs categories (RQ2) and explore strategies for combining them with external sources (RQ3). Our findings reveal which types of Self-Docs are most beneficial and offer practical guidelines for leveraging them to achieve significant improvements in knowledge-intensive question answering tasks.

The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) necessitates accurate AI-generated text detection. However, current approaches largely overlook the influence of author characteristics. We investigate how sociolinguistic attributes—gender, CEFR proficiency, academic field, and language environment—impact state-of-the-art AI text detectors. Using the ICNALE corpus of human-authored texts and parallel AI-generated texts from diverse LLMs, we conduct a rigorous evaluation employing multi-factor ANOVA and weighted least squares (WLS). Our results reveal significant biases: CEFR proficiency and language environment consistently affected detector accuracy, while gender and academic field showed detector-dependent effects. These findings highlight the crucial need for socially aware AI text detection to avoid unfairly penalizing specific demographic groups. We offer novel empirical evidence, a robust statistical framework, and actionable insights for developing more equitable and reliable detection systems in real-world, out-of-domain contexts. This work paves the way for future research on bias mitigation, inclusive evaluation benchmarks, and socially responsible LLM detectors.