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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

#331

Post by bossyTeacher »

embedding-shape wrote: post #280
bossyTeacher wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, then what does this say of LLM engineers at literally any AI company in existence if they are delivering AI that is unreliable then? Surely, they must take responsibility for the quality of their work and not blame it on something else.

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…

> they're reliable in terms of I'm always getting tokens back from them

This is not what you are being sold though. They are not selling you "tokens". Check their marketing articles and you will not see the word token or synonym on any of their headings or subheadings. You are being sold these abilities:

- “Generate reports, draft emails, summarize meetings, and complete projects.”

- “Automate repetitive tasks, like converting screenshots or dashboards into presentations … rearranging meetings … updating spreadsheets with new financial data while retaining the same formatting.”

- "Support-type automation: e.g. customer support agents that can summarize incoming messages, detect sentiment, route tickets to the right team."

- "For enterprise workflows: via Gemini Enterprise — allowing firms to connect internal data sources (e.g. CRM, BI, SharePoint, Salesforce, SAP) and build custom AI agents that can: answer complex questions, carry out tasks, iterate deliverables — effectively automating internal processes."

These are taken straight from their websites. The idea that you are JUST being sold tokens is as hilariously fictional as any company selling you their app was actually just selling you patterns of pixels on your screen.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#332

Post by zipy124 »

figassis wrote: post #197
andy99 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve reviewed a lot of papers, I don’t consider it the reviewers responsibility to manually verify all citations are real. If there was an unusual citation that was relied on heavily for the basis of the work, one would expect it to be checked. Things like broad prior work, you’d just assume it’s part of background. The reviewer is not a proofreader, they are checking the rigour and relevance of the work, which does…

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,…

The problem is most academics just do not have the time to do this for free, or in fact even if paid. In addition you may not even have access to the references. In acoustics it's not uncommon to cite works that don't even exist online and it's unlikely the reviewer will have the work in their library.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#333

Post by zipy124 »

mccoyb wrote: post #325
hyperpape wrote: post #31

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 o…

That's only part of the reason that this type of content is used in academic papers. The other part is that you never know what PhD student / postdoc / researcher will be reviewing your paper, which means you are incentivized to be liberal with citations (however tangential) just in case someone is reading your paper, and has the reaction "why didn't they cite this work, of which I had some role in?" Papers with a fa…

Indeed. One can even game review systems by leaving errors in for the reviewers to find so that they feel good about themselves and that they've done their job. The meta-science game is toxic and full of politics and ego-pleasing.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#334

Post by pama »

noodlesUK wrote: post #324

It astonishes me that there would be so many cases of things like wrong authors. I began using a citation manager that extracted metadata automatically (zotero in my case) more than 15 years ago, and can’t imagine writing an academic paper without it or a similar tool. How 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 l…

Maybe you haven’t carefully checked yet the correctness of automatic tools or of the associated metadata. Zotero is certainly not bug free. Even authors themselves have miss-cited their own past work on occasion, and author lists have had errors that get revised upon resubmission or corrected in errata after publication. The DOI is indeed great, and if it is correct, I can still use the citation as a reader, but the (often abbreviated) lists of authors often have typos. In this case the error rate is not particularly high compared to random early review-level submissions I’ve seen many decades ago. Tools helped increase the number of citations and reduce the error per citation but not sure if they reduced the papers that have at least one error.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#335

Post by semi-extrinsic »

stdbrouw wrote: post #281
semi-extrinsic wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 line…

Yeah, there is an interesting question there (always has been). When do you stop citing the paper for a specific model?

Just to take some examples, is BiCGStab famous enough now that we can stop citing van der Vorst? Is the AdS/CFT correspondence well known enough that we can stop citing Maldacena? Are transformers so ubiquitous that we don't have to cite "Attention is all you need" anymore? I would be closer to yes than no on these, but it's not 100% clear-cut.

One obvious criterion has to be "if you leave out the citation, will it be obvious to the reader what you've done/used"? Another metric is approximately "did the original author get enough credit already"?

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#336

Post by sigmoid10 »

jameshart wrote: post #246
sigmoid10 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you look at their examples in the "Defining Hallucitations" section, I'd say those could be 100% human errors. Shortening authors' names, leaving out authors, misattributing authors, misspelling or misremembering the paper title (or having an old preprint-title, as titles do change) are all things that I would fully expect to happen to anyone in any field were things get ever got published. Modern tools have made…

I mean, if you’re able to take the citation, find the cited work, and definitively state ‘looks like they got the title wrong’ or ‘they attributed the paper to the wrong authors’, that doesn’t sound like what people usually mean when they say a ‘hallucinated’ citation. Work that is lazily or poorly cited but nonetheless attempts to cite real work is not the problem. Work which gives itself false authority by claiming…

>Work which gives itself false authority by claiming to cite works that simply do not exist is the main concern surely?

You'd think so, but apparently it isn't for these folks. On the other hand, saying "we've found 50 hallucinations in scientific papers" generates a lot more clicks than "we've found 50 common citation mistakes that people make all the time"

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#337

Post by disqard »

thruifgguh585 wrote: post #67

> crushed by an avalanche of submissions fueled by generative AI, paper mills, and publication pressure. Run of the mill ML jobs these days ask for "papers in NeurIPS ICLR or other Tier-1 conferences". We're well past Goodhart's law when it comes to publications. It was already insane in CS - now it's reached asylum levels.

You said the quiet part out loud.

Academia has been ripe for disruption for a while now.

The "Rooter" paper came out 20 years ago:

https://www.csail.mit.edu/news/how-fake-paper-generator-tric...

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#338

Post by knallfrosch »

And these are just the citations that any old free tool could have included via Bibtex link from the website?

Not only is that incredibly easy to verify (you could pay a first semester student without any training), it's also a worrying sign on what the paper's authors consider quality. Not even 5 minutes spent to get the citations right!

You have to wonder what's in these papers.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#339

Post by cindyllm »

belter wrote: post #73
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.

"...each of which were missed by 3-5 peer reviewers..." Its sloppy work all the way down...

[dead]

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#340

Post by venturecruelty »

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”?

Somehow people don't kill people nearly as easily, or with as high of a frequency or social support, in places that don't have guns that are more accessible than healthcare. So weird.
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