Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions • Hacker News Board

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#31

Post by hyperpape » Sun, Dec 07, 2025, 3:21 PM UTC

It's awful that there are these hallucinated citations, and the researchers who submitted them ought to be ashamed. I also put some of the blame on the boneheaded culture of academic citations.

"Compression has been widely used in columnar databases and has had an increasing importance over time.[1][2][3][4][5][6]"

Ok, literally everyone in the field already knows this. Are citations 1-6 useful? Well, hopefully one of them is an actually useful survey paper, but odds are that 4-5 of them are arbitrarily chosen papers by you or your friends. Good for a little bit of h-index bumping!

So many citations are not an integral part of the paper, but instead randomly sprinkled on to give an air of authority and completeness that isn't deserved.

I actually have a lot of respect for the academic world, probably more than most HN posters, but this particular practice has always struck me as silly. Outside of survey papers (which are extremely under-provided), most papers need many fewer citations than they have, for the specific claims where the paper is relying on prior work or showing an advance over it.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#32

Post by gdulli » Sun, Dec 07, 2025, 3:21 PM UTC

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.

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.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#33

Post by llm_nerd » Sun, Dec 07, 2025, 3:22 PM UTC

add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #24

llm_nerd wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People will commonly hold LLMs as unusable because they make mistakes. So do people. Books have errors. Papers have errors. People have flawed knowledge, often degraded through a conceptual game of telephone. Exactly as you said, do precisely this to pre-LLM works. There will be an enormous number of errors with utter certainty. People keep imperfect notes. People are lazy. People sometimes even fabricate. None of th…

Quoting myself from just last night because this comes up every time and doesn't always need a new write-up. > You also don't need gunpowder to kill someone with projectiles, but gunpowder changed things in important ways. All I ever see are the most specious knee-jerk defenses of AI that immediately fall apart.

[flagged]

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#34

Post by TomatoCo » Sun, Dec 07, 2025, 3:22 PM UTC

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.

To continue the carpenter analogy, the issue with LLMs is that the shelf looks great but is structurally unsound. That it looks good on surface inspection makes it harder to tell that the person making it had no idea what they're doing.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#35

Post by baxtr » Sun, Dec 07, 2025, 3:24 PM UTC

gdulli wrote: post #32

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.

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?

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#36

Post by idiotsecant » Sun, Dec 07, 2025, 3:26 PM UTC

dclowd9901 wrote: post #28

To me, this is exactly what LLMs are good for. It would be exhausting double checking for valid citations in a research paper. Fuzzy comparison and rote lookup seem primed for usage with LLMs. Writing academic papers is exactly the _wrong_ usage for LLMs. So here we have a clear cut case for their usage and a clear cut case for their avoidance.

Exactly, and there's nothing wrong with using LLMs in this same way as part of the writing process to locate sources (that you verify), do editing (that you check), etc. It's just peak stupidity and laziness to ask it to do the whole thing.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#37

Post by llm_nerd » Sun, Dec 07, 2025, 3:26 PM UTC

the_af wrote: post #27

llm_nerd wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People will commonly hold LLMs as unusable because they make mistakes. So do people. Books have errors. Papers have errors. People have flawed knowledge, often degraded through a conceptual game of telephone. Exactly as you said, do precisely this to pre-LLM works. There will be an enormous number of errors with utter certainty. People keep imperfect notes. People are lazy. People sometimes even fabricate. None of th…

LLM are a force multiplier of this kind of errors though. It's not easy to hallucinate papers out of whole cloth, but LLMs can easily and confidently do it, quote paragraphs that don't exist, and do it tirelessly and at a pace unmatched by humans. Humans can do all of the above but it costs them more, and they do it more slowly. LLMs generate spam at a much faster rate.

>It's not easy to hallucinate papers out of whole cloth, but LLMs can easily and confidently do it, quote paragraphs that don't exist, and do it tirelessly and at a pace unmatched by humans.

But no one is claiming these papers were hallucinated whole, so I don't see how that's relevant. This study -- notably to sell an "AI detector", which is largely a laughable snake-oil field -- looked purely at the accuracy of citations[1] among a very large set of citations. Errors in papers are not remotely uncommon, and finding some errors is...exactly what one would expect. As the GP said, do the same study on pre-LLM papers and you'll find an enormous number of incorrect if not fabricated citations. Peer review has always been an illusion of auditing.

1 - Which is such a weird thing to sell an "AI detection" tool. Clearly it was mostly manual given that they somehow only managed to check a tiny subset of the papers, so in all likelihood was some guy going through citations and checking them on Google Search.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#38

Post by _alternator_ » Sun, Dec 07, 2025, 3:28 PM UTC

jameshart wrote: post #7

Is the baseline assumption of this work that an erroneous citation is LLM hallucinated? Did they run the checker across a body of papers before LLMs were available and verify that there were no citations in peer reviewed papers that got authors or titles wrong?

Let me second this: a baseline analysis should include papers that were published or reviewed at least 3-4 years ago.

When I was in grad school, I kept a fairly large .bib file that almost certainly had a mistake or two in it. I don’t think any of them ever made it to print, but it’s hard to be 100% sure.

For most journals, they actually partially check your citations as part of the final editing. The citation record is important for journals, and linking with DOIs is fairly common.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#39

Post by agentultra » Sun, Dec 07, 2025, 3:28 PM UTC

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?

If I gave you a gun without a safety could you be the one to blame when it goes off because you weren’t careful enough?

The problem with this analogy is that it makes no sense.

LLMs aren’t guns.

The problem with using them is that humans have to review the content for accuracy. And that gets tiresome because the whole point is that the LLM saves you time and effort doing it yourself. So naturally people will tend to stop checking and assume the output is correct, “because the LLM is so good.”

Then you get false citations and bogus claims everywhere.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#40

Post by CapitalistCartr » Sun, Dec 07, 2025, 3:29 PM UTC

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.