Reducing Hallucinations in LLM-based Scientific Literature Analysis Using Peer Context Outlier Detection

The accurate extraction of scientific measurements from literature is a critical yet challenging task in AI4Science, enabling large-scale analysis and integration of quantitative research findings. However, Large Language Models (LLMs) frequently exhibit severe hallucinations, which significantly undermine the reliability of automated scientific document understanding systems. To address this problem, we propose MeasHalu, a novel framework for mitigating scientific measurement hallucinations through enhanced reasoning and targeted optimization. We first present a fine-grained taxonomy of measurement-specific hallucinations, categorizing errors across quantities, units, modifiers, and relations. Our approach incorporates a two-stage reasoning-aware fine-tuning strategy using augmented scientific data and process-based supervision. Furthermore, we introduce a progressive reward curriculum designed to penalize specific hallucination types, significantly improving extraction faithfulness. Experimental results demonstrate that MeasHalu substantially reduces hallucination rates and improves overall accuracy on the MeasEval benchmark. This work provides a targeted solution to a key bottleneck in automated scientific knowledge extraction, facilitating more trustworthy and scalable machine-assisted scientific literature analysis.

The growing scale of academic peer review has motivated the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) as review assistants, yet LLMs can generate fluent but unsupported claims that undermine review reliability. Existing hallucination benchmarks are not designed for peer review, where verification requires grounding claims in long, technical papers. We introduce HalluPeer, a benchmark for detecting hallucinations in scientific peer reviews, providing aligned triples of paper content, human-written reviews, and hallucination-injected reviews, annotated for detection, classification, and localization. Our pipeline induces a peer-review-specific hallucination taxonomy, identifies review contexts, and injects hallucinations with automated filtering. Experiments on 12K papers and 38K reviews show that existing detectors struggle to separate hallucinations from legitimate critique, while evaluation on authentic reviews demonstrates that HalluPeer-defined hallucination patterns occur in real peer reviews, highlighting the critical need for source-aware verification. Our project page can be found in https://github.com/Lin-TzuLing/HalluPeer.git

Accurately extracting nuanced, contextualized data from research articles is laborious and time intensive. Here, we investigate the performance of frontier, browser-based large language models (LLMs) to extract highly contextualized information. We demonstrate four escalating workflows, 1) given an expert curated prompt and research articles, most frontier LLMs perform well at data extraction, however can struggle with interpreting scientific context and nuance, 2) given simple instructions, LLMs can author their own prompts which were almost as eNective as expert-written prompts, 3) autonomous discovery of research literature was diNicult, agents either missed or hallucinated references, and 4) LLMs can create new datasets from published guidelines that closely match human-expert judges, but still require a human-in-the-loop. Together, these findings define an auditable division of labour in which experts specify the evidence standard, models cross-check repeated extractions and researchers resolve disputed cases, providing a practical route to scaling scientific data curation without relinquishing expert oversight.