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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

#371

Post by godelski »

In case people missed it there's some additional important context:

  - Major AI conference flooded with peer reviews written by AI 
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46088236
  - "All OpenReview Data Leaks" 
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46073488
    - "The Day Anonymity Died: Inside the OpenReview / ICLR 2026 Leak" 
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46082370
    - More about the leak
      https://forum.cspaper.org/topic/191/iclr-i-can-locate-reviewer-how-an-api-bug-turned-blind-review-into-a-data-apocalypse
The second one went under the radar, but basically OpenReview left the API open so you didn't need credentials. This meant all reviewers and authors were deanonymized across multiple conferences.

All these links are for ICLR too, which is the #2 ML conference for those that don't know.

And for some important context of the link for this post, note that they only sampled 300 papers and found 50. It looks to be almost exclusively citations but those are probably the easiest things to verify.

And this week CVPR sent out notifications that OpenReview will be down between Dec 6th and Dec 9th. No explanation for why.

So we have reviewers using LLMs, authors using LLMs, and idk the conference systems writing their software with LLMs? Things seem pretty fragile right now...

I think at least this article should highlight one of the problems we have in academia right now (beyond just ML, though it is more egregious there): citation mining. It is pretty standard to have over 50 citations in your 10 page paper these days. You can bet that most of these are not going to be for the critical claims but instead heavily placed in the background section. I looked at a few of the papers and everyone I looked at had their hallucinated citations in background (or background in appendix) sections. So these are "filler" citations, which I think illustrates a problem: citations are being abused. I mean the metric hacking should be pretty obvious if you just look at how many citations ML people have. It's grown exponentially! Do we really need so many citations? I'm all for giving people credit but a hyper-fixation on citation count as our measure of credit just doesn't work. It's far too simple of a metric. Like we might as well measure how good of a coder you are by the number of lines of code you produce[0].

It really seems that academia doesn't scale very well...

[0] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/rDk_LsON3CM

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#372

Post by sureMan6 »

ribosometronome wrote: post #366
stainablesteel wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this brings us to a cultural divide, westerners would see this as a personal scar, as they consider the integrity of the publishing sphere at large to be held up by the integrity of individuals i clicked on 4 of those papers, and the pattern i saw was middle-eastern, indian, and chinese names these are cultures where they think this kind of behavior is actually acceptable, they would assume it's the fault of the jour…

Where do you see the authors? All I'm seeing is: >Anonymous authors >Paper under double-blind review

Either op mistakes the hallucinated citations for the authors (most likely, although there's almost no "middle eastern names" among them) Or he checked some that do have the names listed (I found 4, all had either Chinese names or "western" names) Anyway the great majority of papers (good or bad) I've seen have Indian or Chinese names attached, attributing bad papers to brown people having an inferior culture is just blatantly racist

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#373

Post by CoastalCoder »

Aeglaecia wrote: post #367
stainablesteel wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this brings us to a cultural divide, westerners would see this as a personal scar, as they consider the integrity of the publishing sphere at large to be held up by the integrity of individuals i clicked on 4 of those papers, and the pattern i saw was middle-eastern, indian, and chinese names these are cultures where they think this kind of behavior is actually acceptable, they would assume it's the fault of the jour…

im not sure if you are gonna get downvoted so im sticking a limb out to cop any potential collateral damage in the name of finding out whether the common inhabitant of this forum considers the idea of low trust vs high trust societies to be inherently racist

I think it's an interesting question. Whether or not it can be discussed well here isn't so obvious.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#374

Post by komali2 »

bandofthehawk wrote: post #90
komali2 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok sure I'm down for this hypothetical. I will bring 50 random people in front of you, and you will hand all 50 of them loaded guns. Still feeling it?

Ever been to a shooting range? It's basically a bunch of random people with loaded guns.

That's not as random as letting me choose them! They had to be allowed onto the range, show ID, afford the gun, probably do a background check to get the gun unless they used a loophole (which usually requires some social capital).

I'm proposing the true proposal of many guns rights advocates: anyone might have a gun.

So let me choose the 50 and you give them guns! Why not?

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#375

Post by whatyesaid »

logifail wrote: post #299
whatyesaid wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For references, as the OP said, I don't see why it isn't possible. It's something that exists and is accessible (even if paywalled) or doesn't exist. For reasoning hallucinations are different.

> I don't see why it isn't possible (In good faith) I'm trying really hard not to see this as an "argument from incredulity"[0] and I'm stuggling... Full disclosure: natural sciences PhD, and a couple of (IMHO lame) published papers, and so I've seen the "inside" of how lab science is done, and is (sometimes) published. It's not pretty :/ [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_incredulity

If you've got a prompt, along the lines of: given some references, check their validity. It searches against the articles and URLs provided. You return "yes", "no", and let's also add "inconclusive", for each reference. Basic LLMs can do this much instruction following, just like in 99.99% of times they don't get 829 multiplied by 291 wrong when you ask them (nowadays). You'd prompt it to back all claims solely by search/external links showing exact matches and not use its own internal knowledge.

The fake references generated in the ICLR papers were I assume due to people asking a LLM to write parts of the related work section, not verify references. In that prompt it relies a lot on internal knowledge and spends a majority of time thinking about what the relevant subareas are and cutting edge is, probably. I suppose it omits a second-pass check. In the other case, you have the task of verifying references, which is mostly basic instruction following for advanced models that have web access. I think you'd run the risks of data poisoning and model timeout more than hallucinations.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#376

Post by MarkusQ »

ulrashida wrote: post #85
MarkusQ wrote: post #68

This is as much a failing of "peer review" as anything. Importantly, it is an intrinsic failure, which won't go away even if LLMs were to go away completely. Peer review doesn't catch errors. Acting as if it does, and thus assuming the fact of publication (and where it was published) are indicators of veracity is simply unfounded. We need to go back to the food fight system where everyone publishes whatever they want…

Peer review definitely does catch errors when performed by qualified individuals. I've personally flagged papers for major revisions or rejection as a result of errors in approach or misrepresentation of source material. I have peers who say they have done similar. I'm not sure why you think this isn't the case?

Poor wording on my part.

I should have said "Peer review doesn't catch _all_ errors" or perhaps "Peer review doesn't eliminate errors".

In other words, being "peer reviewed" is nowhere close to "error free," and if (as is often the case) the rate of errors is significantly greater than the rate at which errors are caught, peer review may not even significantly improve the quality.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1182327/

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#377

Post by ricardobeat »

One of the reported hallucinations in this work [1], starting with David Rein, says the other authors are entirely made up. They are indeed absent from the original cited paper [2], but a Google search shows some of the same names featured in citations from other papers [3] [4].

Most of the names in these wrong attributions are actual people though, not hallucinations. What is going on? Is this a case of AI-powered citation management creating some weird feedback loop?

[1] https://app.gptzero.me/documents/54c8aa45-c97d-48fc-b9d0-d49...

[2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2311.12022

[3] https://arxiv.org/html/2509.22536v3

[4] https://arxiv.org/html/2511.01191v1

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#378

Post by zsdfgyu »

stainablesteel wrote: post #362
WWWWH wrote: post #292

Surely this is gross professional misconduct? If one of my postdocs did this they would be at risk of being fired. I would certainly never trust them again. If I let it get through, I should be at risk. As a reviewer, if I see the authors lie in this way why should I trust anything else in the paper? The only ethical move is to reject immediately. I acknowledge mistakes and so on are common but this is different leag…

this brings us to a cultural divide, westerners would see this as a personal scar, as they consider the integrity of the publishing sphere at large to be held up by the integrity of individuals i clicked on 4 of those papers, and the pattern i saw was middle-eastern, indian, and chinese names these are cultures where they think this kind of behavior is actually acceptable, they would assume it's the fault of the jour…

This sort of behavior is not limited to researchers from those cultures. One of the highest profile academic frauds to date was from a German. Look up the Schön scandal.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#379

Post by amrocha »

embedding-shape wrote: post #323
amrocha wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> it’s not “some people”, it’s practically everyone that doesn’t understand how these tools work, and even some people that do. 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…

>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?

Uhh, yes??? We have completely reshaped our cities so that cars can thrive in them at the expense of people. We have laws and exams and enforcement all to prevent cars from being driven by irresponsible people.

And most drugs are literally illegal! The ones that arent are highly regulated!

If your argument is that AI is like heroin then I agree, let’s ban it and arrest anyone making it.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#380

Post by alexcdot »

zzzeek wrote: post #187
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…

correct me if I'm wrong but citations in papers follow a specific format, and the case here is that a tool was used to validate that they are all real. Certainly a tool that scans a paper for all citations and verifies that they actually exist in the journals they reference shouldn't be all that technically difficult to achieve?

There are a ton of edge cases and a bit of contextual understanding for what is a hallucinated citation (i.e. what if its republished from arxiv to ICLR?)

But to your point, seems we need a tool that can do this

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