Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions • Hacker News Board

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#421

Post by mannanj » Mon, Dec 08, 2025, 5:54 PM UTC

dandanua wrote: post #293

mannanj wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this an underlying symptom of lack of accountability of our greater leadership? They do these things, they act like criminals and thieves, and so the people who follow them get shown examples that it's OK while being told to do otherwise. "Show bad examples then hit you on the wrist for following my behavior" is like bad parenting.

I don't think they want you to follow their behavior. They do want accountability, but for everyone below them, not for themselves.

Yes that’s what I meant. Bad parents tell you to do something else, while showing you another example. Then they remain unaccountable to their behavior as parents.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#422

Post by vkou » Mon, Dec 08, 2025, 6:10 PM UTC

figassis wrote: post #410

vkou wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

building on imaginary someone else? That's exactly the same as lying. Is a review not about verifying that the paper and even data is correct? I get reviewers can make mistakes, but this seems like defending intentional mistakes. I mean, in college I have had to review papers, and so took peer review lectures, and nowhere in there was it ever stated that citations are not the reviewer's job. In fact, citation verific…

I'm not defending dishonesty, I'm saying that's what citations do when they are used by honest people.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#423

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Dec 08, 2025, 6:17 PM UTC

Dylan16807 wrote: post #396

nyc_data_geek1 wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Because the second sentence is inflammatory. The side comment is right, it's about low versus high trust societies. Even if GP made a mistake on which names are relevant, they're not being racist about it.

[deleted]

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#424

Post by stainablesteel » Mon, Dec 08, 2025, 6:24 PM UTC

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

you can google the papers and find the arxiv articles where the authors are listed

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#425

Post by make3 » Mon, Dec 08, 2025, 6:53 PM UTC

urspx wrote: post #417

make3 wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this mostly a set of citation typos? To me this mostly calls for better bibtex checking, writing and checking bibtex is super annoying

Forgetting authors, misspelling them or the journals, putting a wrong digit etc... could be citation typos. I don't see how you add 5 non-existing authors and put a different—but conceptually plausible—journal in the bibtex. Besides, I would think most people are using bibliographic managers like Zotero&co..., which will pull metadata through DOIs or such. The errors look a lot more like what happens when you ask an…

I think it's not uncommon to ask an LLM for the bibtex for a paper you know about, & it might mess it up, but that doesn't feel like a fireable offense

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#426

Post by b00ty4breakfast » Mon, Dec 08, 2025, 8:40 PM UTC

SauntSolaire wrote: post #355

b00ty4breakfast wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

maybe the hammer factory should be held responsible for pumping out so many poorly calibrated hammer

The obvious solution in this scenario is.. to just buy a different hammer. And in the case of AI, either review its output, or simply don't use it. No one has a gun to your head forcing you to use this product (and poorly at that). It's quite telling that, even in this basic hypothetical, your first instinct is to gesture vaguely in the direction of governmental action, rather than expect any agency at the level of t…

>It's quite telling that, even in this basic hypothetical, your first instinct is to gesture vaguely in the direction of governmental action, rather than expect any agency at the level of the individual.

When "individuals" (which is a funny way to refer to the global generative AI zeitgeist currently in full binge-mode that is encouraging and enabling this kind of behavior) refuse to regulate themselves, they have to be encouraged through external pressures to do so. Industry is so far up it's own ass wrt AI that all it can see is shit, there is no chance in hell that they will self-regulate. They gladly and indiscriminately slurp up the digital effluent that is currently sliding out the colon of the generative AI super-organism.

And, of course, these "individuals" are more than happy to share the consequences with the rest of the world without sharing too much of the corn that they're digging out of the shit. It does not behoove the rest of the world to not protect it's self-interest, to minimize the consequences of foolish and irresponsible generative AI usage and to make sure it gets it's fare share of the semi-digested golden kernels

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#427

Post by dclowd9901 » Mon, Dec 08, 2025, 10:32 PM UTC

dawnerd wrote: post #230

dclowd9901 wrote: post #28

To me, this is exactly what LLMs are good for. It would be exhausting double checking for valid citations in a research paper. Fuzzy comparison and rote lookup seem primed for usage with LLMs. Writing academic papers is exactly the _wrong_ usage for LLMs. So here we have a clear cut case for their usage and a clear cut case for their avoidance.

Shouldn’t need an llm to check. It’s just a list of authors. I wouldn’t trust an llm on this, and even if they were perfect that’s a lot of resource use just to do something traditional code could do.

I would assume you would use the LLM to not only check the source exists but check that the citation referenced actually says what the author says it does. That's not something you can do heuristically, I would think.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#428

Post by MarkusQ » Tue, Dec 09, 2025, 3:17 AM UTC

watwut wrote: post #127

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 was never supposed to check every single detail and every single citation. They are not proof readers. They are not even really supposed to agree or disagree with your results. They should check the soundness of a method, general structure of a paper, that sort of thing. They do catch some errors, but the expectation is not to do another independent study or something. Passed peer review is the first basi…

Agreed. But too often it's treated as a golden ticket confirmation of veracity, giving the process more epistemological authority than it warrants.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#429

Post by bossyTeacher » Tue, Dec 09, 2025, 6:25 AM UTC

SubiculumCode wrote: post #418

bossyTeacher wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn't whether they have more or less hallucinations. The problem is that they have them. And as long as they hallucinate, you have to deal with that. It doesn't really matter how you prompt, you can't prevent hallucinations from happening and without manual checking, eventually hallucinations will slip under the radar because the only difference between a real pattern and a hallucinated one is that one ex…

Humans also hallucinate. We have an error rate. Your argument makes little sense in absolutist terms.

> Humans also hallucinate

"LLM hallucinations" and hallucinations are essentially different. Human hallucinations are related to perceptual experiences not memory errors like in the case of LLMs. Humans with certain neurological conditions hallucinate. Humans with healthy brains don't.

This habit of misapplying terms needs to stop. Humans are not backpropagation algorithms nor whatever random concept you read about in a comp sci book.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#430

Post by hnfong » Tue, Dec 09, 2025, 3:49 PM UTC

jqpabc123 wrote: post #413

ls612 wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t get it, tech people clearly have the most to gain from AI like Claude Code.

Computer code is highly deterministic. This allows it to be tested fairly easily. Unfortunately, code productionn is not the only use-case for AI. Most things in life are not as well defined --- a matter of judgment. AI is being applied in lots of real world cases where judgment is required to interpret results. For example, "Does this patient have cancer". And it is fairly easy to show that AI's judgment can be high…

Why do you think AI is inherently worse than humans in judging whether a patient has cancer, assuming they are given the same information as the human doctor? Is there some fundamental assumption that makes AI worse, or are you simply projecting your personal belief (trust) in human doctors? (Note that given the speed of progress of AI and that we're talking about what the law ought to be, not what it was in the past, the past performance of AI on cancer cases do not have much relevance unless a fundamental issue with AI is identified)

Note that whether a person has cancer is generally well-defined, although it may not be obvious at first. If you just let the patient go untreated, you'll know the answer quite definitely in a couple years.