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Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

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Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#141

Post by michaelt »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #62
andy99 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve reviewed a lot of papers, I don’t consider it the reviewers responsibility to manually verify all citations are real. If there was an unusual citation that was relied on heavily for the basis of the work, one would expect it to be checked. Things like broad prior work, you’d just assume it’s part of background. The reviewer is not a proofreader, they are checking the rigour and relevance of the work, which does…

Surely there are tools to retrieve all the citations, publishers should spot it easily. However the paper is submitted, like a folder on a cloud drive, just have them include a folder with PDFs/abstracts of all the citations? They might then fraudulently produce papers to cite, but they can't cite something that doesn't exist.

> Surely there are tools to retrieve all the citations,

Even if you could retrieve all citations (which isn't always as easy as you might hope) to validate citations you'd also have to confirm the paper says what the person citing it says. If I say "A GPU requires 1.4kg of copper" citing [1] is that a valid citation?

That means not just reviewing one paper, but also potentially checking 70+ papers it cites. The vast majority of paper reviewers will not check citations actually say what they're claimed to say, unless a truly outlandish claim is made.

At the same time, academia is strangely resistant to putting hyperlinks in citations, preferring to maintain old traditions - like citing conference papers by page number in a hypothetical book that has never been published; and having both a free and a paywalled version of a paper while considering the paywalled version the 'official' version.

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.04142

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#143

Post by upofadown »

If you are searching for references with plausible sounding titles then you are doing that because you don't want to have to actually read those references. After all if you read them and discover that one or more don't support your contention (or even worse, refutes it) then you would feel worse about what you are doing. So I suspect there would be a tendency to completely ignore such references and never consider if they actually exist.

LLMs should be awesome at finding plausible sounding titles. The crappy researcher just has to remember to check for existence. Perhaps there is a business model here, bogus references as a service, where this check is done automatically.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#144

Post by PeterStuer »

andy99 wrote: post #48
CapitalistCartr wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm an industrial electrician. A lot of poor electrical work is visible only to a fellow electrician, and sometimes only another industrial electrician. Bad technical work requires technical inspectors to criticize. Sometimes highly skilled ones.

I’ve reviewed a lot of papers, I don’t consider it the reviewers responsibility to manually verify all citations are real. If there was an unusual citation that was relied on heavily for the basis of the work, one would expect it to be checked. Things like broad prior work, you’d just assume it’s part of background. The reviewer is not a proofreader, they are checking the rigour and relevance of the work, which does…

I think the root problem is that everyone involved, from authors to reviewers to publishers, know that 99.999% of papers are completely of no consequence, just empty calories with the sole purpose of padding quotas for all involved, and thus are not going to put in the effort as if.

This is systemic, and unlikely to change anytime soon. There have been remedies proposed (e.g. limits on how many papers an author can publish per year, let's say 4 to be generous), but they are unlikely to gain traction as thoug most would agree onbenefits, all involved in the system would stand to lose short term.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#145

Post by ineedasername »

How can someone not be aware, at this point, that— sure- use the systems for finding and summarizing research, but for each source, take 2 minutes to find the source and verify?

Really, this isn’t that hard and it’s not at all an obscure requirement or unknown factor.

I think this is much much less “LLMs dumbing things down” and significantly more just a shibboleth for identifying people that were already nearly or actually doing fraudulent research anyway. The ones who we should now go back and look at prior publications as very likely fraudulent as well.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#146

Post by codywashere »

rectang wrote: post #135
theoldgreybeard wrote: post #16

If a carpenter builds a crappy shelf “because” his power tools are not calibrated correctly - that’s a crappy carpenter, not a crappy tool. If a scientist uses an LLM to write a paper with fabricated citations - that’s a crappy scientist. AI is not the problem, laziness and negligence is. There needs to be serious social consequences to this kind of thing, otherwise we are tacitly endorsing it.

“X isn’t the problem, people are the problem.” — the age-old cry of industry resisting regulation.

what regulation are you advocating for here?

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#147

Post by xvilka »

tpoacher wrote: post #82
grayhatter wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The reviewer is not a proofreader, they are checking the rigour and relevance of the work, which does not rest heavily on all of the references in a document. I've always assumed peer review is similar to diff review. Where I'm willing to sign my name onto the work of others. If I approve a diff/pr and it takes down prod. It's just as much my fault, no? > They are also assuming good faith. I can only relate this to…

This is true, but here the equivalent situation is someone using a greek question mark (";") instead of a semicolon (";"), and you as a code reviewer are only expected to review the code visually and are not provided the resources required to compile the code on your local machine to see the compiler fail. Yes in theory you can go through every semicolon to check if it's not actually a greek question mark; but one as…

Code correctness should be checked automatically with the CI and testsuite. New tests should be added. This is exactly what makes sure these stupid errors don't bother the reviewer. Same for the code formatting and documentation.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#148

Post by jordanpg »

Does anyone know, from a technical standpoint, why are citations such a problem for LLMs?

I realize things are probably (much) more complicated than I realize, but programmatically, unlike arbitrary text, citations are generally strings with a well-defined format. There are literally "specs" for citation formats in various academic, legal, and scientific fields.

So, naively, one way to mitigate these hallucinations would be identify citations with a bunch of regexes, and if one is spotted, use the Google Scholar API (or whatever) to make sure it's real. If not, delete it or flag it, etc.

Why isn't something like this obvious solution being done? My guess is that it would slow things down too much. But it could be optional and it could also be done after the output is generated by another process.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#149

Post by k4rli »

TomatoCo wrote: post #34
theoldgreybeard wrote: post #16

If a carpenter builds a crappy shelf “because” his power tools are not calibrated correctly - that’s a crappy carpenter, not a crappy tool. If a scientist uses an LLM to write a paper with fabricated citations - that’s a crappy scientist. AI is not the problem, laziness and negligence is. There needs to be serious social consequences to this kind of thing, otherwise we are tacitly endorsing it.

To continue the carpenter analogy, the issue with LLMs is that the shelf looks great but is structurally unsound. That it looks good on surface inspection makes it harder to tell that the person making it had no idea what they're doing.

Very good analogy I'd say.

Also similar to what Temu, Wish, and other similar sites offer. Picture and specs might look good but it will likely be disappointing in the end.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#150

Post by ls612 »

jqpabc123 wrote: post #2

The legal system has a word to describe AI "slop" --- it is called "negligence". And as the remedy starts being applied (aka "liability"), the enthusiasm for AI will start to wane. I wouldn't be surprised if some businesses ban the use of AI --- starting with law firms.

The legal system has a word to describe software bugs --- it is called "negligence".

And as the remedy starts being applied (aka "liability"), the enthusiasm for software will start to wane.

What if anything do you think is wrong with my analogy? I doubt most people here support strict liability for bugs in code.

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