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GPTZero finds 100 new hallucinations in NeurIPS 2025 accepted papers

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Re: GPTZero finds 100 new hallucinations in NeurIPS 2025 accepted papers

#121
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a _single_ instance of an LLM hallucination should be enough to retract the whole paper and ban further submissions.

For example, authors may have given an LLM a partial description of a citation and asked the LLM to produce bibtex This is equivalent to a typo. I’d like to know which “hallucinations” are completely made up, and which have a corresponding paper but contain some error in how it’s cited. The latter I don’t think matters.

If you click on the article you can see a full list of the hallucinations they found. They did put in the effort to look for plausible partial matches, but most of them are some variation of "No author or title match. Doesn't exist in publication."

Here's a random one I picked as an example.

Paper: https://openreview.net/pdf?id=IiEtQPGVyV

Reference: Asma Issa, George Mohler, and John Johnson. Paraphrase identification using deep contextual- ized representations. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pp. 517–526, 2018.

Asma Issa and John Johnson don't appear to exist. George Mohler does, but it doesn't look like he works in this area (https://www.georgemohler.com/). No paper with that title exists. There are some with sort of similar titles (https://arxiv.org/html/2212.06933v2 for example), but none that really make sense as a citation in this context. EMNLP 2018 exists (https://aclanthology.org/D18-1.pdf), but that page range is not a single paper. There are papers in there that contain the phrases "paraphrase identification" and "deep contextualized representations", so you can see how an LLM might have come up with this title.

Re: GPTZero finds 100 new hallucinations in NeurIPS 2025 accepted papers

#122
post #38
post #2

Yuck, this is going to really harm scientific research. There is already a problem with papers falsifying data/samples/etc, LLMs being able to put out plausible papers is just going to make it worse. On the bright side, maybe this will get the scientific community and science journalists to finally take reproducibility more seriously. I'd love to see future reporting that instead of saying "Research finds amazing che…

For ML/AI/Comp sci articles, providing reproducible code is a great option. Basically, PoC or GTFO.

The most annoying ones are those which discuss loosely the methodology but then fail to publish the weights or any real algorithms.

It's like buying a piece of furniture from IKEA, except you just get an Allen key, a hint at what parts to buy, and blurry instructions.

Re: GPTZero finds 100 new hallucinations in NeurIPS 2025 accepted papers

#124

I don't understand: why aren't there automated tools to verify citations' existence? The data for a citation has a structured styling (APA, MLA, Chicago) and paper metadata is available via e.g. a web search, even if the paper contents are not I guess GPTZero has such a tool. I'm confused why it isn't used more widely by paper authors and reviewers

Looks like GPTZero Source Finder was only released a year ago - if anything, I'm surprised slop-writers aren't using it preemptively, since they're "ahead of the curve" relative to reviewers on this sort of thing...

Re: GPTZero finds 100 new hallucinations in NeurIPS 2025 accepted papers

#125
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that actually strengthens those citiations. The I scratch your back you scratch mine ones are the ones I'm getting at and that is quite hard to do with old and wonderful stuff, the authors there are probably not in a position to reciprocate by virtue of observing the grass from the other side.

I think it's a hard problem. The semanticscholar folks are doing the sort of work that would allow them to track this; I wonder if they've thought about it. A somewhat-related parable: I once worked in a larger lab with several subteams submitting to the same conference. Sometimes the work we did was related, so we both cited each other's paper which was also under review at the same venue. (These were flavor citatio…

No, I'm talking about the ones where the citation itself is almost or even completely irrelevant and used as a way to inflate the citation count of the authors. You could find those by checking whether or not the value as a reference (ie: contributes to the understanding of the paper you are reading) is exceeded by the value of the linkage itself.

Re: GPTZero finds 100 new hallucinations in NeurIPS 2025 accepted papers

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd love to see future reporting that instead of saying "Research finds amazing chemical x which does y" you see "Researcher reproduces amazing results for chemical x which does y. First discovered by z". Most people (that I talk to, at least) in science agree that there's a reproducibility crisis. The challenge is there really isn't a good way to incentivize that work. Fundamentally (unless you're independent weal…

> The challenge is there really isn't a good way to incentivize that work. What if we got Undergrads (with hope of graduate studies) to do it? Could be a great way to train them on the skills required for research without the pressure of it also being novel?

Unfortunately, that might just lead to a bunch of type II errors instead, if an effect requires very precise experimental conditions that undergrads lack the expertise for.

Re: GPTZero finds 100 new hallucinations in NeurIPS 2025 accepted papers

#128
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As one who reviews 20+ papers per year, we don't have time to verify each reference. We verify: is the stuff correct, and is it worthy of publication (in the given venue) given that it is correct. There is still some trust in the authors to not submit made-up-stuff, albeit it is diminishing.

I'm surprised the conference doesn't provide tooling to validate all references automatically.

How would you do that? Even in cases where there's a standard format, a DOI on every reference, and some giant online library of publication metadata, including everything that only exists in dead tree format, that just lets you check whether the cited work exists, not whether it's actually a relevant thing to cite in the context.

Re: GPTZero finds 100 new hallucinations in NeurIPS 2025 accepted papers

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the content of the papers themselves are not necessarily invalidated. For example, authors may have given an LLM a partial description of a citation and asked the LLM to produce bibtex (a formatted reference) Maybe I'm overreacting, but this feels like an insanely biased response. They found the one potentially innocuous reason and latched onto that as a way to hand-wave the entire problem away. Science already had…

Isn't disqualifying X months of potentially great research due to a misformed, but existing reference harsh? I don't think they'd be okay with references that are actually made up.

It's a sign of dishonesty, not a perfect one, but an indicator.

Re: GPTZero finds 100 new hallucinations in NeurIPS 2025 accepted papers

#130
We've been talking about a "crisis of reproducibility" for years and the incentive to crank out high volumes of low-quality research. We now have a tool that brings down the cost of producing plausibly-looking research down to zero. So of course we're going to see that tool abused on a galactic scale.

But here's the thing: let's say you're an university or a research institution that wants to curtail it. You catch someone producing LLM slop, and you confirm it by analyzing their work and conducting internal interviews. You fire them. The fired researcher goes public saying that they were doing nothing of the sort and that this is a witch hunt. Their blog post makes it to the front page of HN, garnering tons of sympathy and prompting many angry calls to their ex-employer. It gets picked up by some mainstream outlets, too. It happened a bunch of times.

In contrast, there are basically no consequences to institutions that let it slide. No one is angrily calling the employers of the authors of these 100 NeurIPS papers, right? If anything, there's the plausible deniability of "oh, I only asked ChatGPT to reformat the citations, the rest of the paper is 100% legit, my bad".

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