DeepReviewer 2.0: A Traceable Agentic System for Auditable Scientific Peer Review

The rapid rise in AI conference submissions has driven increasing exploration of large language models (LLMs) for peer review support. However, LLM-based reviewers often generate superficial, formulaic comments lacking substantive, evidence-grounded feedback. We attribute this to the underutilization of two key components of human reviewing: explicit rubrics and contextual grounding in existing work. To address this, we introduce REVIEWBENCH, a benchmark evaluating review text according to paper-specific rubrics derived from official guidelines, the paper's content, and human-written reviews. We further propose REVIEWGROUNDER, a rubric-guided, tool-integrated multi-agent framework that decomposes reviewing into drafting and grounding stages, enriching shallow drafts via targeted evidence consolidation. Experiments on REVIEWBENCH show that REVIEWGROUNDER, using a Phi-4-14B-based drafter and a GPT-OSS-120B-based grounding stage, consistently outperforms baselines with substantially stronger/larger backbones (e.g., GPT-4.1 and DeepSeek-R1-670B) in both alignment with human judgments and rubric-based review quality across 8 dimensions. The code is available here.

Peer review plays a central role in scholarly publishing, yet verifying whether reviewer claims are supported by manuscript evidence remains a largely manual and time-consuming process. We present Peerify, a pipeline for manuscript-grounded verification of peer-review claims. Given a manuscript and a review comment, the Peerify pipeline decomposes reviews into atomic claims, retrieves relevant manuscript evidence, and determines whether each claim is supported by the paper. To support the development and evaluation of the pipeline, we construct a benchmark of 800 claims derived from authentic peer-review interactions collected from NeurIPS 2024 and ICLR 2024, including a 300-claim hand-labeled subset used to audit the automated supervision. We evaluate state-of-the-art language models and retrieval strategies within the Peerify pipeline, together with entailment baselines. Our results demonstrate the importance of retrieval-centered verification and claim decomposition, while highlighting the challenges posed by ambiguous and interpretive reviewer claims. Automated labels agree with human consensus on 90.3% of audited claims ($κ= 0.87$), while off-the-shelf entailment models stay below 0.24 macro-F1.

A new class of agentic review systems are emerging as a remedy to the pressure placed on peer review systems by AI-assisted research, but it is unclear how they should be evaluated. We evaluate two open-source systems (OpenAIReview and coarse), one proprietary system (Reviewer3), and a zero-shot baseline, across six LLMs spanning frontier and efficient models. First, we study whether AI reviews on ICLR/NeurIPS papers track with papers' quality as approximated by external signals such as citations and acceptance decisions. Every system performs above chance in pairwise accuracy, and the best is OpenAIReview + GPT-5.5 at 83.0%. Second, to test whether systems can catch errors with known ground truth, we construct a perturbation benchmark that injects four categories of errors into papers across eight arXiv subject classes and measure detection recall. The strongest configuration (OpenAIReview + GPT-5.5) catches 71.6% of injected errors, leaving substantial room for improvement. The union of detections across six models reaches 83.3% recall, suggesting different models detect different errors and better harness design can potentially increase performance. Beyond these benchmarks, we study a public deployment of OpenAIReview with real users. Votes on its comments skew positive at 1.44 to 1, and the most common complaints are about false positives and minor nitpicks. Together, by evaluating full review systems backed by state-of-the-art models on real research papers, we show that while AI reviews still have room for improvement, they can already track human quality judgments well, catch important errors, and earn positive feedback from real users.