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

AI-text detectors face a critical robustness challenge: adversarial paraphrasing attacks that preserve semantics while evading detection. We introduce StealthRL, a reinforcement learning framework that stress-tests detector robustness under realistic adversarial conditions. StealthRL trains a paraphrase policy against a multi-detector ensemble using Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with LoRA adapters on Qwen3-4B, optimizing a composite reward that balances detector evasion with semantic preservation. We evaluate six attack settings (M0-M5) against three detector families (RoBERTa, FastDetectGPT, and Binoculars) at the security-relevant 1% false positive rate operating point. StealthRL achieves near-zero detection (0.001 mean TPR@1%FPR), reduces mean AUROC from 0.74 to 0.27, and attains a 99.9% attack success rate. Critically, attacks transfer to a held-out detector family not seen during training, revealing shared architectural vulnerabilities rather than detector-specific brittleness. We additionally conduct LLM-based quality evaluation via Likert scoring, analyze detector score distributions to explain why evasion succeeds, and provide per-detector AUROC with bootstrap confidence intervals. Our results expose significant robustness gaps in current AI-text detection and establish StealthRL as a principled adversarial evaluation protocol. Code and evaluation pipeline are publicly available at https://github.com/suraj-ranganath/StealthRL.

Key Contributions

• StealthRL: GRPO + LoRA fine-tuning on Qwen3-4B that trains a paraphrase policy against a multi-detector ensemble, achieving 0.001 mean TPR@1%FPR across three detector families
• Demonstrates cross-architecture transfer to a held-out detector family, exposing shared structural vulnerabilities rather than detector-specific brittleness
• Establishes an adversarial evaluation protocol at the security-relevant 1% FPR operating point with LLM-based quality scoring and bootstrap confidence intervals

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