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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

#381

Post by alexcdot »

acituan wrote: post #259
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.

> AI is not the problem, laziness and negligence is. As much as I agree with you that this is wrong, there is a danger in putting the onus just on the human. Whether due to competition or top down expectations, humans are and will be pressured to use AI tools alongside their work and produce more. Whereas the original idea was for AI to assist the human, as the expected velocity and consumption pressure increases hum…

Absolutely, expectations and tools given by management are a real problem.

If management fires you because they are wrong about how good AI is, and you're right - at the end of the day, you're fired and the manager is in lalaland.

People need to actually push the correct calibration of what these tools should be trusted to do, while also trying to work with what they have.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#382

Post by alexcdot »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #72
zwnow wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it a good paper if the info in it cant be trusted lmao

Whether the information in the paper can be trusted is an entirely separate concern. Old Chinese mathematics texts are difficult to date because they often purport to be older than they are. But the contents are unaffected by this. There is a history-of-math problem, but there's no math problem.

Problem is that most ML papers today are not independently verifiable proofs - in most, you have to trust the scientist didn't fraudulently produce their results.

There is so much BS being submitted to conferences and decreasing the amount of BS they see would result in less skimpy reviews and also less apathy

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#383

Post by lijenjin »

ulrashida wrote: post #102

Unfortunately 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…

The linked article at the end says: "First, using Hallucination Check together with GPTZero’s AI Detector allows users to check for AI-generated text and suspicious citations at the same time, and even use one result to verify the other. Second, Hallucination Check greatly reduces the time and labor necessary to verify a document’s sources by identifying flawed citations for a human to review."

On their site (https://gptzero.me/sources) it also says "GPTZero's Hallucination Detector automatically detects hallucinated sources and poorly supported claims in essays. Verify academic integrity with the most accurate hallucination detection tool for educators", so it does more than just identify invalid citations. Seems to do exactly what you're talking about.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#384

Post by ungreased0675 »

sansseriff wrote: post #236
bossyTeacher wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>LLMs can actually make up for their negative contributions. They could go through all the references of all papers and verify them, They will just hallucinate their existence. I have tried this before

I don’t see why this would be the case with proper tool calling and context management. If you tell a model with blank context ‘you are an extremely rigorous reviewer searching for fake citations in a possibly compromised text’ then it will find errors. It’s this weird situation where getting agents to act against other agents is more effective than trying to convince a working agent that it’s made a mistake. Perhaps…

Have you actually tried this? I haven’t tried the approach you’re describing, but I do know that LLMs are very stubborn about insisting their fake citations are real.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#385

Post by Forgeties79 »

theoldgreybeard wrote: post #94
Forgeties79 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If my calculator gives me the wrong number 20% of the time yeah I should’ve identified the problem, but ideally, that wouldn’t have been sold to me as a functioning calculator in the first place.

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.

Generally I’d ditch that tool because it doesn’t work. A calculator is supposed to calculate. If it can’t reliably calculate, then it’s not a functioning tool and I am tired of people insisting it is functioning properly.

LLM’s simply aren’t good enough for all the use cases some people insist they are. They’re powerful tools that have been far too broadly applied and there’s too much money and too many reputations being put on the line to acknowledge the obvious limitations. Frankly I’m sick of it.

I had somebody on HN a few months ago insist to me that because we value art and fiction, LLM’s being wrong when we need them to be correct (in ways that are also not always easy to identify) was desirable. I don’t even know what to do with that kind of logic other than chalk it up as trolling. I don’t want my computer to trick me into false solutions.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#386

Post by throw10920 »

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…

> these are cultures where they think this kind of behavior is actually acceptable, they would assume it's the fault of the journal for accepting the paper. they don't see the loss of reputation to be a personal scar because they instead attribute blame to the game.

I have a relative who lived in a country in the East for several years, and he says that this is just factually true.

The vast majority of people who disagree with this statement have never actually lived in these cultures. They just hallucinate that they have because they want that statement to be false so badly.

...but, simultaneously, I'm also not seeing where you see the authors of the papers - I only see hallucitation authors. e.g. at the link for the first paper submission (https://openreview.net/forum?id=WPgaGP4sVS), there doesn't appear to be any authors listed. Are you confusing the hallucinated citation authors with the primary paper authors?

In that case, I would expect Eastern authors to be over-represented, because they just publish a lot more.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#387

Post by crazygringo »

ml-anon wrote: post #313
crazygringo wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just because we can't reliably prevent them doesn't mean they're not an easily recognizable and meaningful category of error for us to talk about.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#388

Post by ssivark »

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…

PSA: Please note that the names are hallucinated author lists part of the hallucinated citations, and not names of offending authors.

AFAIK the submissions are still blinded and we don't know who the authors are. We will, surely, soon -- since ICLR maintains all submissions in public record for posterity, even if "withdrawn". They are unblinded after the review period finishes.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#389

Post by nyc_data_geek1 »

titanomachy wrote: post #370
ribosometronome wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yeah WTF? Both authors and reviewers are hidden. Is this comment just an attempt to whip up racist fervor?

Don't understand why you're being downvoted, here.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#390

Post by nyc_data_geek1 »

CoastalCoder wrote: post #373
Aeglaecia wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What are you people talking about. Have you even looked at the article?

The names of the Asian/Indian people GP is referring to, are explicitly stated to be hallucinations in the article. So, high vs low trust society questions aside, the entire assertion here is explicitly wrong. These are not authors submitting hallucinated content, these are fictitious authors who are themselves hallucinations.

You are making up a guy to get mad at

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