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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

#281

Post by stdbrouw »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #235
stdbrouw wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that references in a scientific paper should be plentiful but aren't really that important, is a consequence of a previous technological revolution: the internet. You'll find a lot of papers from, say, the '70s, with a grand total of maybe 10 references, all of them to crucial prior work, and if those references don't say what the author claims they should say (e.g. that the particular method that is employe…

It's also a consequence of the sheer number of building blocks which are involved in modern science. In the methods section, it's very common to say "We employ method barfoo [1] as implemented in library libbar [2], with the specific variant widget due to Smith et al. [3] and the gobbledygook renormalization [4,5]. The feoozbar is solved with geometric multigrid [6]. Data is analyzed using the froiznok method [7] fro…

Do you still feel the same way if the froiznok method is an ANOVA table of a linear regression, with a log-transformed outcome? Should I reference Fisher, Galton, Newton, the first person to log transform an outcome in a regression analysis, the first person to log transform the particular outcome used in your paper, the R developers, and Gauss and Markov for showing that under certain conditions OLS is the best linear unbiased estimator? And then a couple of references about the importance of quantitative analysis in general? Because that is the level of detail I’m seeing :-)

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#282

Post by [deleted] »

sebastiennight wrote: post #268
sebastiennight wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One incorrect way to think of it is "LLMs will sometimes hallucinate when asked to produce content, but will provide grounded insights when merely asked to review/rate existing content". A more productive (and secure) way to think of it is that all LLMs are "evil genies" or extremely smart, adversarial agents. If some PhD was getting paid large sums of money to introduce errors into your work, could they still mislea…

Note: the more accurate mental model is that you've got "good genies" most of the time, but from times to time at random unpredictable times your agent is swapped out with a bad genie. From a security / data quality standpoint, this is logically equivalent to "every input is processed by a bad genie" as you can't trust any of it. If I tell you that from time to time, the chef in our restaurant will substitute table s…

[deleted]

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#283

Post by calmworm »

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.

I don’t understand. You’re saying even with crappy tools one should be able to do the job the same as with well made tools?

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#284

Post by exasperaited »

ls612 wrote: post #278
exasperaited wrote: post #201

Every single person who did this should be censured by their own institutions. Do it more than once? Lose job. End of story.

Some of the examples listed are using the wrong paper title for a real paper (titles can change over time), missing authors (I’ve seen this before on Google Scholar bibitex), misstatements of venue (huh this working paper I added to my bibliography two years ago got published now nice to know), and similar mistakes. This just tells me you hate academics and want to hurt them gratuitously.

> This just tells me you hate academics and want to hurt them gratuitously.

Well then you're being rather silly, because that is a silly conclusion to draw (and one not supported by the evidence).

A fairer conclusion was that I meant what is obvious: if you use AI to generate a bibliography, you are being academically negligent.

If you disagree with that, I would say it is you that has the problem with academia, not me.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#285

Post by rcpt »

somehnguy wrote: post #237
only-one1701 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely brutal case of engineering brain here. Real "guns don't kill people, people kill people" stuff.

Your second statement is correct. What about it makes it “engineering brain”?

If the blame were solely on the user then we'd see similar rates of deaths from gun violence in the US vs. other countries. But we don't, because users are influenced by the UX

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#286

Post by teddyh »

chistev wrote: post #217

Last month, I was listening to the Joe Rogan Experience episode with guest Avi Loeb, who is a theoretical physicist and professor at Harvard University. He complained about the disturbingly increasing rate at which his students are submitting academic papers referencing non-existent scientific literature that were so clearly hallucinated by Large Language Models (LLMs). They never even bothered to confirm their refer…

> Avi Loeb, who is a theoretical physicist and professor at Harvard University

Also a frequent proponent of UFO claims about approaching meteors.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#287

Post by rcpt »

baxtr wrote: post #35
gdulli wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's like saying guns aren't the problem, the desire to shoot is the problem. Okay, sure, but wanting something like a metal detector requires us to focus on the more tangible aspect that is the gun.

If I gave you a gun would you start shooting people just because you had one?

Probably not but, empirically, there are a lot of short tempered people who would.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#288

Post by smileybarry »

Yoofie wrote: post #226
kklisura wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI is not the problem, laziness and negligence is This reminds me about discourse about a gun problem in US, "guns don't kill people, people kill people", etc - it is a discourse used solely for the purpose of not doing anything and not addressing anything about the underlying problem. So no, you're wrong - AI IS THE PROBLEM.

No, the OP is right in this case. Did you read TFA? It was "peer reviewed". > Worryingly, each of these submissions has already been reviewed by 3-5 peer experts, most of whom missed the fake citation(s). This failure suggests that some of these papers might have been accepted by ICLR without any intervention. Some had average ratings of 8/10, meaning they would almost certainly have been published. If the peer revie…

Peer reviewers can also use AI tools, which will hallucinate a "this seems fine" response.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#289

Post by xnx »

CapitalistCartr wrote: post #40
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.

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.

No doubt the best electricians are currently better than the best AI, but the best AI is likely now better than the novice homeowner. The trajectory over the past 2 years has been very good. Another five years and AI may be better than all but the very best, or most specialized, electricians.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#290

Post by Terr_ »

scythmic_waves wrote: post #100
tpoacher wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> as a code reviewer [you] 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. As a PR reviewer I frequently pull down the code and run it. Especially if I'm suggesting changes because I want to make sure my suggestion is correct. Do other PR reviewers not do this?

I don't, but that's because ensuring the PR compiles and passes old+new automated tests is an enforced requirement before it goes out.

So running it myself involves judging other risks, much higher-level ones than bad unicode characters, like the GUI button being in the wrong place.

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