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2% of ICML papers desk rejected because the authors used LLM in their reviews

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151–160 of 172 posts

Re: 2% of ICML papers desk rejected because the authors used LLM in their reviews

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In that case, I hope these frauds have been banned for life.

I was thinking this too, but I don't believe this is the case, and I feel like it would not be a good idea either. Most of these people are likely students; this should be a learning moment, but I don't think it is yet grounds for their entire academic career to be crippled by being unable to publish in a top-tier ML venue.

What makes you think these are mostly students? I may have missed that in the methodology

Re: 2% of ICML papers desk rejected because the authors used LLM in their reviews

#152
post #116

Interesting, so someone submitting a paper for review could also submit one with hidden instructions for LLMs to summarise or review it in a very positive light. Given this detection method works so well in the use case of feeding reviewing LLMs instructions, it should also work for the original submitted paper itself, as long as it was passed along with its watermark intact. Even those just using LLMs to summarise c…

This definitely happened to a paper that I submitted a couple of years ago. ChatGPT 4 was the frontier. The reviewer gave a positive, if bland, summary with some reasonable suggestions for improvement and some nitpicks. There were no grammar or line-number comments like those from other reviewers. They were all issues that would have been resolved by reading the appendices, but the reviewer hadn't uploaded into ChatG…

How depressing.

Re: 2% of ICML papers desk rejected because the authors used LLM in their reviews

#153

Interesting, so someone submitting a paper for review could also submit one with hidden instructions for LLMs to summarise or review it in a very positive light. Given this detection method works so well in the use case of feeding reviewing LLMs instructions, it should also work for the original submitted paper itself, as long as it was passed along with its watermark intact. Even those just using LLMs to summarise c…

The conference organizers are very much aware of this possibility. Prompt injection for the sake of getting a positive review is explicitly banned.

Re: 2% of ICML papers desk rejected because the authors used LLM in their reviews

#154
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what experience anyone in this thread has with grad level research as a student/author, but I can assure you that heads roll over this kind of thing. A professor's career is built on reputation, and that reputation is as strong as their students' (who do much of the "work" such as it is). It comes down to the professor, but this can be a career-ending moment for those students and I'm quite confident the…

[flagged]

The issue is not the tool use - research is a small community and violating submission terms is gonna get you stuck in the naughty corner.

Re: 2% of ICML papers desk rejected because the authors used LLM in their reviews

#155
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a fully consensus view, but a majority of sociologists agree that high severity deterrence has limited effectiveness against crime. Instead, certainty of enforcement is the most salient factor.

Correct. We also have evidence both from cheating in sports and in academia that stiff punishments do not work. Many people hold the false belief that if it is easy to cheat then the punishments must be extremely severe to scare would be cheaters. It just does not work. Preventing cheating is way easier said than done.

> We also have evidence both from cheating in sports and in academia that stiff punishments do not work.

Maybe so, but there is evidence that lack of punishment also don't work.

Neither extreme "works". Just because terminal punishments do not prevent the worst cheating does not in any way imply that slap on the wrists reduce incidents of cheating.

Re: 2% of ICML papers desk rejected because the authors used LLM in their reviews

#156
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment doesn't seem to fit the discussion at all? The discussion is not about humans using LLLs to write papers. It is about humans who agreed not to use LLVM in reviewing papers, then did exactly that.

It might be that paper authors required others not to use LLMs for reviewing their work. Then, by the rule of reciprocity, they shouldn't use LLMs for reviewing others work. The article is unclear on whether this implied reciprocity rule was explicitly stated or not.

It was. More details here: https://icml.cc/Conferences/2026/LLM-Policy

In particular: "Any reviewer who is an author on a paper that requires Policy A must also be willing to follow Policy A."

Re: 2% of ICML papers desk rejected because the authors used LLM in their reviews

#157
post #139
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading the article is exhausting. If I can leave a comment just as well without reading the article, then what's the problem? If I got something wrong, other people will point it out. That's a more efficient use of my time. /s

Not to water down the snark, but isnt cause of situation described in the article the exact mentality you are mocking?

I believe that's the joke, yes.

Re: 2% of ICML papers desk rejected because the authors used LLM in their reviews

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slightly more nuanced in that the reciprocal reviewer may have been essentially forced to sign despite having other commitments or may not have even been the lead contributor. Nowadays if a student submits a side project to a top-tier conference then it is required that if any authors have significant publication count in top-tier venues, then one must be a mandatory reviewer. Then one must sign that agreement. Stude…

I keep not learning how corrupt authorship of academic papers is. When I read papers, I imagine all the authors have been working away together in an office somewhere and they all wrote parts of the paper and all read it and all have a feeling of ownership of it and deeply understand the whole thing. But I forget how the only academic paper I ever had published was one that I never read and had no understanding of. A…

Not hard to see why. Being an author helps your cv. Allowing you to be an author for tangential or minimal contribs can help keep good relations, especially if there are future options and financial things depending on having good relations. Putting a name on a paper costs nothing and nobody checks how big the contribution was. It's slightly dilutes the subjective authorship fraction of those who did the work, but sometimes the additional person also brings in a nice prestigious affiliation that even has a positive impact on how seriously the paper is taken... It's a game.

Re: 2% of ICML papers desk rejected because the authors used LLM in their reviews

#159
post #149

People in the comment asking for harsher punishment should note that we don’t know how many people selected the „I have no strong preference“ option and got assigned to group A randomly. It’s a bit harder to make the argument that those people _explicitly_ agreed to not use LLMs. And given how the desk-rejection logic relies on an ethical integrity argument, actual explicit intent is important.

They agreed that policy A is fine for them. Then they got assigned policy A and they were notified about this.
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