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?
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…
Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions
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Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions
#322Unfortunately while catching false citations is useful, in my experience that's not usually the problem affecting paper quality. Far more prevalent are authors who mis-cite materials, either drawing support from citations that don't actually say those things or strip the nuance away by using cherry picked quotes simply because that is what Google Scholar suggested as a top result. The time it takes to find these erro…
Exactly abuse of citations is a much more prevalent and sinister issue and has been for a long time. Fake citations are of course bad but only tip of the iceberg.
Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions
#323Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel like what "unreliable" means, depends on well you understand LLMs. I use them in my professional work, and they're reliable in terms of I'm always getting tokens back from them, I don't think my local models have failed even once at doing just that. And this is the product that is being sold. Some people take that to mean that responses from LLMs are (by human standards) "always correct" and "based on knowledg…
it’s not “some people”, it’s practically everyone that doesn’t understand how these tools work, and even some people that do. Lawyers are running their careers by citing hallucinated cases. Researchers are writing papers with hallucinated references. Programmers are taking down production by not verifying AI code. Humans were made to do things, not to verify things. Verifying something is 10x harder than doing it rig…
Again, true for most things. A lot of people are terrible drivers, terrible judge of their own character, and terrible recreational drug users. Does that mean we need to remove all those things that can be misused?
I much rather push back on shoddy work no matter what source. I don't care if the citations are from a robot or a human, if they suck, then you suck, because you're presenting this as your work. I don't care if your paralegal actually wrote the document, be responsible for the work you supposedly do.
> Humans were made to do things, not to verify things.
I'm glad you seemingly have some grand idea of what humans were meant to do, I certainly wouldn't claim I do so, but I'm also not religious. For me, humans do what humans do, and while we didn't used to mostly sit down and consume so much food and other things, now we do.
Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions
#324How are the authors even submitting citations? Surely they could be required to send a .bib or similar file? It’s so easy to then quality control at least to verify that citations exist by looking up DOIs or similar.
I know it wouldn’t solve the human problem of relying on LLMs but I’m shocked we don’t even have this level of scrutiny.
Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions
#325It'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 o…
Papers with a fake air of authority of easily dispatched with. What is not so easily dispatched with is the politics of the submission process.
This type of content is fundamentally about emotions (in the reviewer of your paper), and emotions is undeniably a large factor in acceptance / rejection.
Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions
#326If 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.
Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions
#327Earlier 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…
Maybe there could be a system to classify the importance of each reference.
Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions
#328If 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.
Shouldn't there be a black list of people who get caught writing fraudulent papers?
Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions
#329Unfortunately while catching false citations is useful, in my experience that's not usually the problem affecting paper quality. Far more prevalent are authors who mis-cite materials, either drawing support from citations that don't actually say those things or strip the nuance away by using cherry picked quotes simply because that is what Google Scholar suggested as a top result. The time it takes to find these erro…
It seems like this is the type of thing that LLMs would actually excel at though: find a list of citations and claims in this paper, do the cited works support the claims?
Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions
#330If 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.
Ah, the "guns don't kill people, people kill people" argument. I mean sure, but having a tool that made fabrication so much easier has made the problem a lot worse, don't you think?
Tiered licensing, mandatory safety training, and weapon classification by law enforcement works really well for Canada’s gun regime, for example.