From Isolated Scoring to Collaborative Ranking: A Comparison-Native Framework for LLM-Based Paper Evaluation

Scientific paper evaluation often involves not only assessing a manuscript itself, but also relating it to contemporaneous research and prior literature. However, existing LLM-based methods typically model these signals separately and lack a unified mechanism for propagating review evidence across papers. We propose $\textbf{GraphReview}$, a graph-based LLM framework that formulates paper evaluation as review-signal message passing over a semantic paper graph. The graph jointly captures intrinsic quality, synchronic links among contemporaneous papers, and diachronic links to prior work. LLMs are used to estimate node-level quality priors and generate edge-level comparative evidence through pairwise paper comparisons, while Personalized PageRank integrates review signals for quality ranking, decision prediction, and review generation. To produce higher-quality graph evidence, we propose reward-induced maximum likelihood objectives for training the LLM backbones. Experiments show that GraphReview consistently outperforms the strongest baseline, achieving average improvements of 29.7% on decision and ranking metrics, including gains of 23.7% in Accuracy and 57.6% in Spearman's $ρ$. It also produces higher-quality review texts and generalizes effectively across time periods and conference venues. The code is available at https://github.com/ECNU-Text-Computing/GraphReview.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in academic peer review, yet their reliability, alignment with human judgment, and robustness to adversarial attacks remain poorly understood. We present a systematic benchmark of LLM-as-a-Reviewer on 898 papers stratified from NeurIPS and ICLR, evaluating 12 LLMs along three axes: rating calibration, divergence from human reviewers, and resistance to prompt injection embedded via an invisible font-mapping attack. We find that LLMs systematically overrate weaker submissions and diverge from humans in topical emphasis, under-flagging Clarity and over-flagging Reproducibility, while producing reviews two to three times longer with lower lexical diversity and a more standardized vocabulary. Prompt injection remains highly effective. Simple hidden instructions can promote low-scoring papers to acceptance-level ratings in a substantial fraction of cases, with effectiveness varying sharply across model families. While LLMs offer utility in structuring evaluations, their integration into peer review requires safeguards against both intrinsic biases and adversarial risks.

Assessing the quality of scientific research is essential for scholarly communication, yet widely used approaches face limitations in scalability, subjectivity, and time delay. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) offer new opportunities for automated research evaluation based on textual content. This study examines whether LLMs can support post-publication peer review tasks by benchmarking their outputs against expert judgments and citation-based indicators. Two evaluation tasks are constructed using articles from the H1 Connect platform: identifying high-quality articles and performing finer-grained evaluation including article rating, merit classification, and expert style commenting. Multiple model families, including BERT models, general-purpose LLMs, and reasoning oriented LLMs, are evaluated under multiple learning strategies. Results show that LLMs perform well in coarse grained evaluation tasks, achieving accuracy above 0.8 in identifying highly recommended articles. However, performance decreases substantially in fine-grained rating tasks. Few-shot prompting improves performance over zero-shot settings, while supervised fine-tuning produces the strongest and most balanced results. Retrieval augmented prompting improves classification accuracy in some cases but does not consistently strengthen alignment with citation indicators. The overall correlations between model outputs and citation indicators remain positive but moderate.