Discuss More, Comment Less: Boosting Automated Research via Multi-Perspective Collaborative 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.

Automated peer review is often framed as generating fluent critique, yet reviewers and area chairs need judgments they can audit: where a concern applies, what evidence supports it, and what concrete follow-up is required. DeepReviewer2.0 is a process-controlled agentic review system built around an output contract: it produces a traceable review package with anchored annotations, localized evidence, and executable follow-up actions, and it exports only after meeting minimum traceability and coverage budgets. Concretely, it first builds a manuscript-only claim--evidence--risk ledger and verification agenda, then performs agenda-driven retrieval and writes anchored critiques under an export gate. On 134 ICLR2025 submissions under three fixed protocols, an un-finetuned 196B model running DeepReviewer2.0 outperforms Gemini-3.1-Pro-preview, improving strict major-issue coverage (37.26% vs.\ 23.57%) and winning 71.63% of micro-averaged blind comparisons against a human review committee, while ranking first among automatic systems in our pool. We position DeepReviewer2.0 as an assistive tool rather than a decision proxy, and note remaining gaps such as ethics-sensitive checks.

Recent auto-research systems can produce complete papers, but feasibility is not the same as quality, and the field still lacks a systematic study of how good agent-generated papers actually are. We introduce ResearchArena, a minimal scaffold that lets off-the-shelf agents (Claude Code using Opus 4.6, Codex using GPT-5.4, and Kimi Code using K2.5) carry out the full research loop themselves (ideation, experimentation, paper writing, self-refinement) under only lightweight guidance. Across 13 computer science seeds and 3 trials per agent-domain pair, ResearchArena yields 117 agent-generated papers, each evaluated under three complementary lenses: a manuscript-only reviewer (SAR), an artifact-aware peer review (PR) in which agents inspect the workspace alongside the manuscript, and an human conducted meta-review. Under SAR alone the picture is optimistic: Claude Code obtains the highest score, outperforms Analemma's FARS, and matches the weighted-average human ICLR 2025 submission, suggesting that minimally scaffolded agents can produce papers that look competitive on manuscript-only review. Manual inspection, however, reveals this picture is overstated: SAR scores are poorly aligned with its actual acceptance decisions and reward plausible framing without verifying experimental substance. Under artifact-aware PR scores drop sharply, and manual auditing identifies experimental rigor as the major bottleneck, decomposing into three failure modes (fabricated results, underpowered experiments, and plan/execution mismatch) that are highly agent-dependent: Codex 5%/8% paper-vs-artifact mismatch / fabricated references versus Kimi Code 77%/72%, a $\sim$15$\times$ spread that tracks distinct research personas the agents develop. None of the 117 agent-generated papers reaches the acceptance bar of a top-tier venue. This suggests that we are still gapped from the true auto-research.