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Updated practice for review articles and position papers in ArXiv CS category

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Re: Updated practice for review articles and position papers in ArXiv CS category

#161
I had a convo with a senior CS prof at Stanford two years ago. He was excited about LLM use in paper writing to, e.g., "lower barriers" to idk, "historically marginalized groups" and to "help non-native English speakers produce coherent text". Etc, etc - all the normal tech folk gobbledygook, which tends to forecast great advantage with minimal cost...and then turn out to be wildly wrong.

There are far more ways to produce expensive noise with LLMs than signal. Most non-psychopathic humans tend to want to produce veridical statements. (Except salespeople, who have basically undergone forced sociopathy training.) At the point where a human has learned to produce coherent language, he's also learned lots of important things about the world. At the point where a human has learned academic jargon and mathematical nomenclature, she has likely also learned a substantial amount of math. Few people want to learn the syntax of a language with little underlying understanding. Alas, this is not the case with statistical models of papers!

Re: Updated practice for review articles and position papers in ArXiv CS category

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would be the point of blaming LLMs? What would that accomplish? What does it even mean to blame LLMs? LLMs are not submitting these papers on their own, people are. As far as I'm concerned, whatever blame exists rests on those people and the system that rewards them.

Perhaps what is meant is "blame the development of LLMs." We don't "blame guns" for shootings, but certainly with reduced access to guns, shootings would be fewer.

Guns have absolutely nothing to do with access to guns.

Guns are entirely inert objects, devoid of either free will nor volition, they have no rights and no responsibilities.

LLMs likewise.

Re: Updated practice for review articles and position papers in ArXiv CS category

#163
post #5

So what they no longer accept is preprints (or rejects…) It’s of course a pretty big deal given that arXiv is all about preprints. And an accepted journal paper presumably cannot be submitted to arXiv anyway unless it’s an open journal.

> And an accepted journal paper presumably cannot be submitted to arXiv anyway unless it’s an open journal. You cannot upload the journal’s version, but you can upload the text as accepted (so, the same content minus the formatting).

I suspect that any editorial changes that happened as part of the journal's acceptance process - unless they materially changed the content - would also have to be kept back as they would be part of the presentation of the paper (protected by copyright) rather than the facts of the research.

Re: Updated practice for review articles and position papers in ArXiv CS category

#164
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had been kinda hoping for a web-of-trust system to replace peer review. Anyone can endorse an article. You can decide which endorsers you trust, and do some network math to find what you think is reading. With hashes and signatures and all that rot. Not as gate-keepy as journals and not as anarchic as purely open publishing. Should be cheap, too.

web-of-trust systems seldom scale

Surely they rely on scale? Or did I get whooshed??

Re: Updated practice for review articles and position papers in ArXiv CS category

#165
post #5

So what they no longer accept is preprints (or rejects…) It’s of course a pretty big deal given that arXiv is all about preprints. And an accepted journal paper presumably cannot be submitted to arXiv anyway unless it’s an open journal.

So we need to create a new website that actually accepts preprints like arXivs original goal from 30 years ago.

I think every project more or less deviates from its original goal given enough time. There are few exceptions in CS like GNU coreutils. cd, ls, pwd, ... they do one thing and do it well very likely for another 50 years.

Re: Updated practice for review articles and position papers in ArXiv CS category

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isnt arxiv also a likely LLM traing ground?

why train LLMs on preprint inaccurate findings?

Peer review doesn’t, never was intended to, and shouldn’t, guarantee accuracy nor veracity.

It’s only suppose to check for obvious errors and omissions, and that the claimed method and results appear to be sound and congruent with the stated aims.

Re: Updated practice for review articles and position papers in ArXiv CS category

#168
post #89

There is a general problem with rewarding people for the volume of stuff they create, rather than the quality. If you incentivize researchers to publish papers, individuals will find ways to game the system, meeting the minimum quality bar, while taking the least effort to create the most papers and thereby receive the greatest reward. Similarly, if you reward content creators based on views, you will get view maximi…

I think many with this opinion actually misunderstand. Slop will not save your scientific career. Really it is not about papers but securing grant funding by writing compelling proposals, and delivering on the research outlined in these proposals.

Re: Updated practice for review articles and position papers in ArXiv CS category

#169
post #89

There is a general problem with rewarding people for the volume of stuff they create, rather than the quality. If you incentivize researchers to publish papers, individuals will find ways to game the system, meeting the minimum quality bar, while taking the least effort to create the most papers and thereby receive the greatest reward. Similarly, if you reward content creators based on views, you will get view maximi…

I think many with this opinion actually misunderstand. Slop will not save your scientific career. Really it is not about papers but securing grant funding by writing compelling proposals, and delivering on the research outlined in these proposals.

Ideally that is true. I do see the volume-over-quality phenomenon with some early career folks who are trying to expand their CVs. It varies by subfield though. While grant metrics tend to dominate career progression, paper metrics still exist. Plus, it’s super common in those proposals to want to have a bunch of your own papers to cite to argue that you are an expert in the area. That can also drive excess paper production.

Re: Updated practice for review articles and position papers in ArXiv CS category

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For position (opinion) or review (summarizing state of art and often laden with opinions on categories and future directions). LLMs would be happy to generate both these because they require zero technical contributions, working code, validated results, etc.

If you believe that, can you demonstrate how to generate a position or review paper using an LLM?

[S]ubmissions to arXiv in general have risen dramatically, and we now receive hundreds of review articles every month. The advent of large language models have made this type of content relatively easy to churn out on demand, and the majority of the review articles we receive are little more than annotated bibliographies, with no substantial discussion of open research issues.

arXiv believes that there are position papers and review articles that are of value to the scientific community, and we would like to be able to share them on arXiv. However, our team of volunteer moderators do not have the time or bandwidth to review the hundreds of these articles we receive without taking time away from our core purpose, which is to share research articles.

From TFA. The problem exists. Now.

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