ProofTrace: Detecting AI-Generated Proofs via Structural Signatures

arXiv:2611.08412v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The growing use of AI in mathematics raises a question: can we detect AI involvement in proofs, separately from AI assistance with writing? Historical arXiv papers, recent papers disclosing substantive AI use, and manuscripts released by OpenAI provide a rich empirical basis for studying this question. However, several challenges remain: lack of matched case-control pairs; potential incompleteness of disclosure; and lack of ready-to-use features designed to capture signals of AI involvement in proofs. To address these challenges, we construct five cohorts comprising 8,281 papers by combining existing manuscripts with those we produced using generative AI. These cohorts span different levels of AI involvement and include matched pairs of papers addressing the same research problems. We then introduce ProofTrace, a framework that represents each paper as a graph of immediate proof support (GIPS) and extracts interpretable features of mathematical organization. Our study yields three discoveries. First, principal-component projections of our features reveal a qualitative gradient of AI involvement, where AI-reworded papers remain close to human papers, the two AI-generated cohorts depart in broadly shared directions, and papers disclosing substantive AI use occupy intermediate positions which shifts toward AI-generated cohorts over time. Second, we identify recurring signatures of AI-generated proofs, such as fewer externally cited results, greater reliance on intermediate conclusions, and altered graph connectivity; many of these signatures persist under controls for research field, manuscript length, or graph size. Finally, in a separate detection experiment, ProofTrace distinguishes human-written papers from those disclosing substantive AI use. Its performance remains stable under AI rewording, whereas the performance of state-of-the-art text-based detectors declines sharply.