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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

#311

Post by vkou »

dpkirchner wrote: post #265
figassis wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is absolutely the reviewers job to check citations. Who else will check and what is the point of peer review then? So you’d just happily pass on shoddy work because it’s not your job? You’re reviewing both the authors work and if there were people to at needed to ensure citations were good, you’re checking their work also. This is very much the problem today with this “not my problem” mindset. If it passes review,…

Agreed, and I'd go further. If nobody is reviewing citations they may as well not exist. Why bother?

1. To make it clear what is your work, and what is building on someone else's.

2. If the paper turns out to be important, people will bother.

3. There's checking for cursory correctness, and there's forensic torture.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#312

Post by senshan »

skybrian wrote: post #300
senshan wrote: post #294

As many pointed out, the purpose of peer review is not linting, but the assessment of the novelty and subtle omissions. Which incentives can be set to discourage the negligence? How about bounties? A bounty fund set up by the publisher and each submission must come with a contribution to the fund. Then there be bounties for gross negligence that could attract bounty hunters. How about a wall of shame? Once negligence…

For the kinds of omissions described here, maybe the journal could do an automated citation check when the paper is submitted and bounce back any paper that has a problem with a day or two lag. This would be incentive for submitters to do their own lint check.

True if the citation has only a small typo or two. But if it is unrecognizable or even irrelevant, this is clearly bad (fraudulent?) research -- each citation has be read and understood by the researcher and put in there only if absolutely necessary to support the paper.

There must be price to pay for wasting other people's time (lives?).

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#313

Post by ml-anon »

crazygringo wrote: post #159
michaelcampbell wrote: post #70

After an interview with Cory Doctorow I saw recently, I'm going to stop anthropomorphizing these things by calling them "hallucinations". They're computers, so these incidents are just simply Errors.

They're a very specific kind of error, just like off-by-one errors, or I/O errors, or network errors. The name for this kind of error is a hallucination. We need a word for this specific kind of error, and we have one, so we use it. Being less specific about a type of error isn't helping anyone. Whether it "anthropomorphizes", I couldn't care less. Heck, bugs come from actual insects. It's a word we've collectively s…

No it’s not. It’s made up bullshit that arises for reasons that literally no one can formalize or reliably prevent. This is the exact opposite of specific.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#314

Post by wpollock »

dilawar wrote: post #86
grayhatter wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The reviewer is not a proofreader, they are checking the rigour and relevance of the work, which does not rest heavily on all of the references in a document. I've always assumed peer review is similar to diff review. Where I'm willing to sign my name onto the work of others. If I approve a diff/pr and it takes down prod. It's just as much my fault, no? > They are also assuming good faith. I can only relate this to…

> I've always assumed peer review is similar to diff review. Where I'm willing to sign my name onto the work of others. If I approve a diff/pr and it takes down prod. It's just as much my fault, no? Ph.D. in neuroscience here. Programmer by trade. This is not true. Less you know about most peer revies is better. The better peer reviews are also not this 'thorough' and no one expects reviewers to read or even check re…

> The better peer reviews are also not this 'thorough' and no one expects reviewers to read or even check references.

Checking references can be useful when you are not familiar with the topic (but must review the paper anyway). In many conference proceedings that I have reviewed for, many if not most citations were redacted so as to keep the author anonymous (citations to the author's prior work or that of their colleagues).

LLMs could be used to find prior work anyway, today.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#315

Post by ml-anon »

jordanpg wrote: post #221
Muller20 wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In general, a citation is something that needs to be precise, while LLMs are very good at generating some generic high probability text not grounded in reality. Sure, you could implement a custom fix for the very specific problem of citations, but you cannot solve all kinds of hallucinations. After all, if you could develop a manual solution you wouldn't use an LLM. There are some mitigations that are used such as RA…

My point is that citations are constantly making headlines, yet at least at first glance, seems like an eminently solvable problem.

So solve it?

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#316

Post by amrocha »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #192
theoldgreybeard wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it was a well understood property of calculators that they gave incorrect answers randomly then you need to adjust the way you use the tool accordingly.

Uh yeah... I would not use that tool . A tool which doesn't do its job randomly is useless.

Sorry, Utkar the manager will fire you if you don’t use his shitty calculator. If you take the time to check the output every time you’ll be fired for being too slow. Better pray the calculator doesn’t lie to you.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#317

Post by chistev »

teddyh wrote: post #286
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.

Yea, he harped on that a lot during the podcast

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#318

Post by foxfired »

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 disagree. When the tool promises to do something, you end up trusting it to do the thing.

When Tesla says their car is self driving, people trust them to self drive. Yes, you can blame the user for believing, but that's exactly what they were promised.

> Why didn't the lawyer who used ChatGPT to draft legal briefs verify the case citations before presenting them to a judge? Why are developers raising issues on projects like cURL using LLMs, but not verifying the generated code before pushing a Pull Request? Why are students using AI to write their essays, yet submitting the result without a single read-through? They are all using LLMs as their time-saving strategy. [0]

It's not laziness, its the feature we were promised. We can't keep saying everyone is holding it wrong.

[0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/none-of-us-read-the-specs

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#319

Post by thfuran »

tpoacher wrote: post #271
thfuran wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What exactly is the analogy you’re suggesting, using LLMs to verify the citations?

not OP, but that wouldn't really be necessary. One could submit their bibtex files and expect bibtex citations to be verifiable using a low level checker. Worst case scenario if your bibtex citation was a variant of one in the checker database you'd be asked to correct it to match the canonical version. However, as others here have stated, hallucinated "citations" are actually the lesser problem. Citing irrelevant pa…

Yes, I think verifying mere existence of the cited paper barely moves the needle. I mean, I guess automated verification of that is a cheap rejection criterion, but I don’t think it’s overall very useful.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#320

Post by rolandog »

foxfired wrote: post #318
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 disagree. When the tool promises to do something, you end up trusting it to do the thing. When Tesla says their car is self driving, people trust them to self drive. Yes, you can blame the user for believing, but that's exactly what they were promised. > Why didn't the lawyer who used ChatGPT to draft legal briefs verify the case citations before presenting them to a judge? Why are developers raising issues on proj…

Very well put. You're promised Artificial Super Intelligence and shown a super cherry-picked promo and instead get an agent that can't hold its drool and needs constant hand-holding... it can't be both things at the same time, so... which is it?
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