Integrating Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Large Language Model for Robust and Explainable AI Text Detection

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been rapidly evolving lately, resulting in the need for strong, explainable models to detect the difference between human-generated and machine-generated articles. Existing approaches which are mostly based on fine-tuned transformers suffer from several drawbacks such as rapid obsolescence, paraphrasing attacks, and lack of interpretability. To improve their ability to detect, this paper proposes a novel paradigm called Human vs. LLM Identification (HLI) which introduces a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)-inspired evidence-based detection strategy alongside a fine-tuned transformer classifier. Our core model, DeBERTa-Sentinel, is built on top of a fine-tuned Microsoft DeBERTa-v3-small model, which uses a disentangled attention mechanism to better capture subtle syntactic and stylistic deviations characteristic of AI-generated text. We evaluate our framework on a balanced dataset of 43,456 text samples, curated from the OpenGPTText corpus and covering AI-generated and human-authored content across diverse domains including news, education, and creative text. The experimental results show improved performance over the selected baselines, with our framework achieving an accuracy of 97.53%, precision of 95.89%, recall of 99.34%, and ROC-AUC of 99.53%. In addition, explainability is integrated into our framework through Local Interpretable Model-agnostic Explanations (LIME) analysis, providing token-level insight into classification decisions. This study establishes a benchmark for scalable, explainable AI text detection, with implications for academic integrity, content moderation, and combating misinformation.