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I flagged two research papers for fake authors and both were accepted as orals

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Re: I flagged two research papers for fake authors and both were accepted as orals

#151

Post by nightshift1 »

unknown_user_84 wrote: post #134
csallen wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People react negatively to this, because they fear a dystopian society of the sort we've seen in plenty of movies, and rightfully so. But it's also worth pointing out that "consequences and reputations stemming from one's actions" is already the world we live in and always have lived in. Hell, even Hacker News has karma points, downvoting, shadow banning, and the like. There's no such thing as a society with zero con…

this reminds me of an episode of the TV show. the Orville that I recently watched where they stumbled upon a planet that had the social credit scoring system and everybody had little badges with literal upvote and down vote buttons on them. and when your grandma buys you ice cream and you're a little kid you say thank you and you hit the upvote button and she likes you even more because you hit the upvote button then…

The Orville is excellent. I am a fan. Here is another show/episode that is very similar and relevant here : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive_(Black_Mirror)

Re: I flagged two research papers for fake authors and both were accepted as orals

#152

Post by Matumio »

GuB-42 wrote: post #112
bradley13 wrote: post #84

The next logical step in "publish or perish". Get rid of p-o-p and this problem will also largely disappear. I know managers and administrators want a simple metric, but there is no simple metric for research.

But is there a not-simple metric? The advantage of "publish or perish" is that it is based on something concrete. The system is gamed, for sure, and even more so with AI, but still, a paper which is cited a lot tend to be useful and the authors get rewarded. Remove that metric, and for the lack of a better idea, it will just turn into a game of who has the best connections or who talks the most convincingly, I mean,…

The point is that not everything of value can be easily measured.

Instead of wasting some resources on corruption and bad judgement, we now waste them by forcing people to chase the wrong goal. In other words: "If you rely on incentives, you undermine values." (Barry Schwartz)

So I don't disagree with you, but I think we went too far into that direction. We have allow people to use their better judgement sometimes.

Re: I flagged two research papers for fake authors and both were accepted as orals

#153

Post by BigTTYGothGF »

lubujackson wrote: post #147
nneonneo wrote: post #2

At this point, in the field of AI research: - papers are written by AI (as pointed out in this article, and as obvious to anyone who spends a while actually reading recent AI research) - papers are reviewed by AI (NeurIPS is doing an AI assisted review experiment - https://neurips.cc/Conferences/2026/ai-reviewing-experiment - and I feel the trend is moving towards AI reviewers whether we like it or not) - papers are…

The entire concept of publishing as a validation step for actual science has been declining for decades, fully co-opted by pay to play and virtue signaling for academic hiring. AI is simply going to bury it as a useful system. What will grow from the ashes will be something much more dynamic, where verifiable data is the gold and the conclusions and associated details will persist only as the human-level translation.

> virtue signaling

In this case presumably the virtue is "able to churn out papers".

Re: I flagged two research papers for fake authors and both were accepted as orals

#154

Post by BigTTYGothGF »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #45
podocarp wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's academia not taking it seriously, more like these publishers are just coasting on brand name and trying to milk every cent out of it. Peer review is essentially being a Reddit mod or something, you get nothing out of it but karma or a sticker, and the platform/publisher gets all the benefit. Imagine being an author and paying to publish your novel. Also btw the editor is another author but has to p…

> Imagine being an author and paying to publish your novel. That is... completely normal. > Also btw the editor is another author but has to proofread your book for free. That would be weirder; if you're paying for your own publication, you don't get an editor at all unless you hire them yourself.

> That is... completely normal

Only at vanity presses. Money flows towards the author, as they say.

Re: I flagged two research papers for fake authors and both were accepted as orals

#155

Post by cucumber3732842 »

csallen wrote: post #37
ryandrake wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Consequences and reputations stemming from one's actions" isn't necessarily draconian social scoring. Without a structure for imposing consequences on wrongdoers, we're not a society, we're just monkeys flinging poo at each other.

People react negatively to this, because they fear a dystopian society of the sort we've seen in plenty of movies, and rightfully so. But it's also worth pointing out that "consequences and reputations stemming from one's actions" is already the world we live in and always have lived in. Hell, even Hacker News has karma points, downvoting, shadow banning, and the like. There's no such thing as a society with zero con…

>Hell, even Hacker News has karma points, downvoting, shadow banning, and the like.

Internet Right/WrongThink scoring should be an argument against any sort of formalized or standardized social credit, not for it.

Re: I flagged two research papers for fake authors and both were accepted as orals

#156

Post by inigyou »

NetMageSCW wrote: post #130
inigyou wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are the same thing. The Chinese social credit is mostly about money. The USA money credit is affected by social factors. They are the same.

What social factors do you imagine affect your credit score in the US?

Like if you're arrested for some misdemeanor, that goes on your social credit score. If you're caught peeing in public your social credit score basically goes to zero (registered sex offender).

Re: I flagged two research papers for fake authors and both were accepted as orals

#157

Post by hellohello2 »

nottorp wrote: post #63
hellohello2 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My 2 cents: AI has improved writing considerably for non-native english speakers (in particular China). Writing feels more standardized/boring but easier to read overall. I hit fewer papers that are a pain to read. The most problematic aspect I see are semi-bogus claims i.e. sentences that aren't false, but don't quite feel right either. YMMV.

You mean it may have improved translation...

No that's not what I meant, I meant exactly what I said above.

Re: I flagged two research papers for fake authors and both were accepted as orals

#158

Post by vdqtp3 »

inigyou wrote: post #156
NetMageSCW wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What social factors do you imagine affect your credit score in the US?

Like if you're arrested for some misdemeanor, that goes on your social credit score. If you're caught peeing in public your social credit score basically goes to zero (registered sex offender).

And neither of those will affect your US financial credit score

Re: I flagged two research papers for fake authors and both were accepted as orals

#159

Post by nneonneo »

godelski wrote: post #148
nneonneo wrote: post #2

At this point, in the field of AI research: - papers are written by AI (as pointed out in this article, and as obvious to anyone who spends a while actually reading recent AI research) - papers are reviewed by AI (NeurIPS is doing an AI assisted review experiment - https://neurips.cc/Conferences/2026/ai-reviewing-experiment - and I feel the trend is moving towards AI reviewers whether we like it or not) - papers are…

> because there are just so many papers at leading AI conferences Ironically a big reason there's so many papers to review is because so many are rejected. A low acceptance rate is unhealthy, especially in conferences (1 round of review). Papers just get recycled to the next conference, which, as is easy to model, creates an exponential feedback loop. It doesn't explain all the papers submitted, but it sure can expla…

Rejection works when there are multiple tiers of venues; authors often “give up” on a venue if it seems like their work isn’t getting in, which allows higher-tier conferences to maintain a lower accept rate and take only the “best” research. Reviewers know what venues they are reviewing for, and attentive ones will adapt their review based on the prestige of the venue.

Of course, there’s lots of room for subjectivity here; what constitutes the “best” research is still at the whim of reviewers.

Re: I flagged two research papers for fake authors and both were accepted as orals

#160

Post by godelski »

nneonneo wrote: post #159
godelski wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because there are just so many papers at leading AI conferences Ironically a big reason there's so many papers to review is because so many are rejected. A low acceptance rate is unhealthy, especially in conferences (1 round of review). Papers just get recycled to the next conference, which, as is easy to model, creates an exponential feedback loop. It doesn't explain all the papers submitted, but it sure can expla…

Rejection works when there are multiple tiers of venues; authors often “give up” on a venue if it seems like their work isn’t getting in, which allows higher-tier conferences to maintain a lower accept rate and take only the “best” research. Reviewers know what venues they are reviewing for, and attentive ones will adapt their review based on the prestige of the venue. Of course, there’s lots of room for subjectivity…

  > Reviewers know what venues they are reviewing for, and attentive ones will adapt their review based on the prestige of the venue.
Works that way in theory but I've seen people be stricter in an ICML workshop than CVPR.

I don't think it's constable that luck plays a big role. Do we need you do a third NeruIPS study to convince people?

The real problem is that we don't actually know if an idea is good or not until it's had more time to be explored and studied. A great example of this is diffusion models. There's 6 years between Sohl-Dickstein's paper and Jonathan Ho's. All because GANs got popular, so only a few people kept looking at diffusion until one person scaled it. There's hundreds of cases like that, including attention and resnets (I'll defend Schmidhuber's Highway Nets here). So much fruitful research gets cast away for no good reason.

A reviewer can't ever determine if research is good or impactful. It's impossible to do by just reading a paper. So that needs to be taken out of the equation. What a reviewer can do, though, is determine if a paper is bad or fraudulent. So IMO, we should publish anything that isn't fraudulent. Let time tell us the impact, because history tells us we're not very good at figuring that out ourselves

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