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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

#61

Post by pmontra »

llm_nerd wrote: post #19
jameshart wrote: post #7

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…

Fabricated citations are not errors.

A pre LLM paper with fabricated citations would demonstrate will to cheat by the author.

A post LLM paper with fabricated citations: same thing and if the authors attempt to defend themselves with something like, we trusted the AI, they are sloppy, probably cheaters and not very good at it.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#62

Post by pbhjpbhj »

andy99 wrote: post #48
CapitalistCartr wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm an industrial electrician. A lot of poor electrical work is visible only to a fellow electrician, and sometimes only another industrial electrician. Bad technical work requires technical inspectors to criticize. Sometimes highly skilled ones.

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…

Surely there are tools to retrieve all the citations, publishers should spot it easily.

However the paper is submitted, like a folder on a cloud drive, just have them include a folder with PDFs/abstracts of all the citations?

They might then fraudulently produce papers to cite, but they can't cite something that doesn't exist.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#63

Post by Forgeties79 »

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.

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.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#64

Post by gdulli »

baxtr wrote: post #35
gdulli wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's like saying guns aren't the problem, the desire to shoot is the problem. Okay, sure, but wanting something like a metal detector requires us to focus on the more tangible aspect that is the gun.

If I gave you a gun would you start shooting people just because you had one?

That doesn't address my point at all but no, I'm not a violent or murderous person. And most people aren't. Many more people do, however, want to take shortcuts to get their work done with the least amount of effort possible.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#65

Post by judofyr »

embedding-shape wrote: post #47
TomatoCo wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To continue the carpenter analogy, the issue with LLMs is that the shelf looks great but is structurally unsound. That it looks good on surface inspection makes it harder to tell that the person making it had no idea what they're doing.

Regardless, if a carpenter is not validating their work before selling it, it's the same as if a researcher doesn't validate their citations before publishing. Neither of them have any excuses, and one isn't harder to detect than the other. It's just straight up laziness regardless.

I think this is a bit unfair. The carpenters are (1) living in world where there’s an extreme focus on delivering as quicklyas possible, (2) being presented with a tool which is promised by prominent figures to be amazing, and (3) the tool is given at a low cost due to being subsidized.

And yet, we’re not supposed to criticize the tool or its makers? Clearly there’s more problems in this world than «lazy carpenters»?

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#66

Post by withinboredom »

Aurornis wrote: post #58
thaumasiotes wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If a scientist uses an LLM to write a paper with fabricated citations - that’s a crappy scientist. Really? Regardless of whether it's a good paper?

Citations are a key part of the paper. If the paper isn’t supported by the citations, it’s not a good paper.

Have you ever followed citations before? In my experience, they don't support what is being citated, saying the opposite or not even related. It's probably only 60%-ish that actually cite something relevant.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#67

Post by thruifgguh585 »

> 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.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#68

Post by MarkusQ »

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, their colleagues and other adversaries try their best to shred them, and the winners are the ones that stand up to the maelstrom. It's messy, but it forces critics to put forth their arguments rather than quietly gatekeeping, passing what they approve of, suppressing what they don't.

Re: Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

#69

Post by zipy124 »

shusaku wrote: post #10
TaupeRanger wrote: post #8

It's going to be even worse than 50: > Given that we've only scanned 300 out of 20,000 submissions, we estimate that we will find 100s of hallucinated papers in the coming days.

20,000 submissions to a single conference? That is nuts

When academics are graded based on number of papers this is the result.
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