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Updated practice for review articles and position papers in ArXiv CS category
241–250 of 250 posts
Re: Updated practice for review articles and position papers in ArXiv CS category
#242Earlier 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.
The problem with an endorsement scheme is citation rings, ie groups of people who artificially inflate the perceived value of some line of work by citing each other. This is a problem even now, but it is kept in check by the fact that authors do not usually have any control over who reviews their paper. Indeed, in my area, reviews are double blind, and despite claims that “you can tell who wrote this anyway” research…
But if you have a citation ring and one of the paper goes down as being fraudulent it reflects extremely bad on all people that endorsed it. So it's a bad strategy (game theory wise) to take part in such rings.
Re: Updated practice for review articles and position papers in ArXiv CS category
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
Genuinely curious, did we ever manage to ban a piece of technology worldwide and effectively?
A large part of geopolitics is concerned with limiting the spread of weapons of mass destruction worldwide and to the greatest possible degree of efficacy. Moreover, the investment to train state-of-the-art models is greater than the Manhattan project and involves larger and more complex supply chains-- it cannot be done clandestinely. Because the scope of the project is large and resource-intensive there are not man…
> Worth considering, but the fact is that they can and are choosing not to. If the choice is there it is not an inevitability but a decision.
Pakistan, Israel, North Korea and South Africa have nuclear weapons while not having the right to do so. So I'm not sure how banning graphics cards, thing we are already failing at in China right now will ever work. Especially if countries like China develop their own chip building capacities.
Re: Updated practice for review articles and position papers in ArXiv CS category
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
The PDFs (yes, they still use PDF) keep being uploaded to arXiv.
ArXiv is just extra steps for a worse experience. Github is perfectly fine for pdf’s also.
But arXiv carries a certain ... reputation. I assume that's why papers keep being uploaded there.
Re: Updated practice for review articles and position papers in ArXiv CS category
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
Setting aside the wisdom of moderation, instead of banning AI, use it to accelerate review.
Unfortunately, (this kind of) AI doesn't accelerate review. (That's before you get into the ease of producing adversarial inputs: a moderation system not susceptible to these could be wired up backwards as a generation system that produces worthwhile research output, and we don't have one of those.)
I'm skeptical: use two different AIs which don't share the same weaknesses + random sample of manual reviews + blacklisting users that submit adversarial inputs for X years as a deterrent.
Re: Updated practice for review articles and position papers in ArXiv CS category
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately, (this kind of) AI doesn't accelerate review. (That's before you get into the ease of producing adversarial inputs: a moderation system not susceptible to these could be wired up backwards as a generation system that produces worthwhile research output, and we don't have one of those.)
I'm skeptical: use two different AIs which don't share the same weaknesses + random sample of manual reviews + blacklisting users that submit adversarial inputs for X years as a deterrent.
But how do you know an input is adversarial? There are other issues: verdicts are arbitrary, the false positive rate means you'd need manual review of all the rejects (unless you wanted to reject something like 5% of genuine research), you need the appeals process to exist and you can't automate that, so bad actors can still flood your bureaucracy even if you do implement an automated review process…
Re: Updated practice for review articles and position papers in ArXiv CS category
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm skeptical: use two different AIs which don't share the same weaknesses + random sample of manual reviews + blacklisting users that submit adversarial inputs for X years as a deterrent.
But how do you know an input is adversarial? There are other issues: verdicts are arbitrary, the false positive rate means you'd need manual review of all the rejects (unless you wanted to reject something like 5% of genuine research), you need the appeals process to exist and you can't automate that, so bad actors can still flood your bureaucracy even if you do implement an automated review process…
I'm not on the moderation bandwagon to begin with per the above, but if an organization invents a bunch of fake reasons that they find convincing, then any system they come up with is going to have its flaws. Ultimately, the goal is to make cooperation easy and defection costly.
> But how do you know an input is adversarial?
Prompt injection and jailbreaking attempts are pretty clear. I don't think anything else is particularly concerning.
> the false positive rate means you'd need manual review of all the rejects (unless you wanted to reject something like 5% of genuine research)
Not all rejects, just those that submit an appeal. There are a few options, but ultimately appeals require some stakes, such as:
1. Every appeal carries a receipt for a monetary donation to arxiv that's refunded only if the appeal succeeds.
2. Appeal failures trigger the ban hammer with exponentially increasing times, eg. 1 month, 3 months, 9 months, 27 months, etc.
Bad actors either respond to deterrence or get filtered out while funding the review process itself.
Re: Updated practice for review articles and position papers in ArXiv CS category
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
But how do you know an input is adversarial? There are other issues: verdicts are arbitrary, the false positive rate means you'd need manual review of all the rejects (unless you wanted to reject something like 5% of genuine research), you need the appeals process to exist and you can't automate that, so bad actors can still flood your bureaucracy even if you do implement an automated review process…
I'm not on the moderation bandwagon to begin with per the above, but if an organization invents a bunch of fake reasons that they find convincing, then any system they come up with is going to have its flaws. Ultimately, the goal is to make cooperation easy and defection costly. > But how do you know an input is adversarial? Prompt injection and jailbreaking attempts are pretty clear. I don't think anything else is p…
> I don't think anything else is particularly concerning.
You can always generate slop that passes an anti-slop filter, if the anti-slop filter uses the same technology as the slop generator. Side-effects may include: making it exceptionally difficult for humans to distinguish between adversarial slop, and legitimate papers. See also: generative adversarial networks.
> Not all rejects, just those that submit an appeal.
So, drastically altering the culture around how the arXiv works. You have correctly observed that "appeals require some stakes" under your system, but the arXiv isn't designed that way – and for good reason. An appeal is either "I think you made a procedural error" or "the valid procedural reasons no longer apply": adding penalties for using the appeals system creates a chilling effect, skewing the metrics that people need to gain insight as to whether a problem exists.
Look at the article numbers. Year, month, and then a 5-digit code. It is not expected that more than 100k articles will be submitted in a given month, across all categories. If the arXiv ever needs a system that scales in the way yours does, with such sloppy tolerances, then it'll be so different to what it is today that it should probably have a different name.
If we were to add stakes, I think "revoke endorsement, requiring a new set of endorsers" would be sufficient. (arXiv endorsers already need to fend off cranks, so I don't think this would significantly impact them.) Exponential banhammer isn't the right tool for this kind of job, and I think we certainly shouldn't be getting the financial system involved (see the famous paper A Fine is a Price by Uri Gneezy and Aldo Rustichini: https://rady.ucsd.edu/_files/faculty-research/uri-gneezy/fin...).
Re: Updated practice for review articles and position papers in ArXiv CS category
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
What would a system that rewards people for quality rather than volume look like? How would an online world that is optimized for humans, not algorithms, look like? Should content creators get paid?
> Should content creators get paid? Everybody "creates content" (like me when I take a picture of beautiful sunset). There is no such thing as "quality". There is quality for me and quality for you. That is part of the problem, we can't just relate to some external, predefined scale. We (the sum of people) are the approximate, chaotic, inefficient scale. Be my guest to propose a "perfect system", but - just in case t…
Compare work you did earlier with work you did later. Is one better than the other? If so, does it mean there is such a thing as "quality"?
Re: Updated practice for review articles and position papers in ArXiv CS category
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
What would a system that rewards people for quality rather than volume look like? How would an online world that is optimized for humans, not algorithms, look like? Should content creators get paid?
> Should content creators get paid? I don't think so. Youtube was a better place when it was just amateurs posting random shit.
Newspapers charge. How-to guides sell. I paid for education.