A Measurement Perspective on Benchmarking LLM-Generated Text Detectors using Item Response Theory

Benchmarking large language model (LLM)-generated text detectors commonly relies on aggregate detector-level metrics such as accuracy, F1 score, and AUC. Although useful for summarizing overall performance, these metrics provide limited insight into how benchmark composition shapes detector comparisons or which texts distinguish detectors with different response profiles. We propose a measurement-based benchmarking framework for jointly characterizing benchmark heterogeneity and detector behavior using multidimensional item response theory (IRT). By treating benchmark texts as measurement items and detectors as respondents, the framework estimates text-level discrimination and difficulty-location parameters alongside multidimensional detector abilities. We apply the framework to a benchmark of 32K human-written and machine-generated texts across four domains, evaluated by 14 detectors. The estimated IRT item-parameter space reveals distinct but overlapping human-machine distributions, with substantial variation across domains and text lengths. The human-machine label shows the strongest multivariate association with this space, while domain and text length further contribute to benchmark heterogeneity. Detector ability profiles reveal multidimensional and domain-dependent response patterns that are not fully reflected in aggregate performance rankings. As a practical application, clustering texts in the estimated IRT space yields a compact subset of 2,088 texts (6.5% of the full 32K benchmark) that largely preserves the comparative detector-performance patterns observed on the full benchmark. Overall, the proposed framework provides a principled and interpretable methodology for benchmarking heterogeneous detection technologies while jointly characterizing the measurement properties of the texts used for their evaluation.