Automated Peer Review

Most automated peer review systems rely on textual manuscript content alone, leaving visual elements such as figures and external scholarly signals underutilized. We introduce REM-CTX, a reinforcement-learning system that incorporates auxiliary context into the review generation process via correspondence-aware reward functions. REM-CTX trains an 8B-parameter language model with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) and combines a multi-aspect quality reward with two correspondence rewards that explicitly encourage alignment with auxiliary context. Experiments on manuscripts across Computer, Biological, and Physical Sciences show that REM-CTX achieves the highest overall review quality among six baselines, outperforming other systems with substantially larger commercial models, and surpassing the next-best RL baseline across both quality and contextual grounding metrics. Ablation studies confirm that the two correspondence rewards are complementary: each selectively improves its targeted correspondence reward while preserving all quality dimensions, and the full model outperforms all partial variants. Analysis of training dynamics reveals that the criticism aspect is negatively correlated with other metrics during training, suggesting that future studies should group multi-dimension rewards for review generation.

Rebuttal generation is a critical component of the peer review process for scientific papers, enabling authors to clarify misunderstandings, correct factual inaccuracies, and guide reviewers toward a more accurate evaluation. We observe that Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle to perform targeted refutation and maintain accurate factual grounding when used directly for rebuttal generation, highlighting the need for structured reasoning and author intervention. To address this, in the paper, we introduce DEFEND an LLM based tool designed to explicitly execute the underlying reasoning process of automated rebuttal generation, while keeping the author-in-the-loop. As opposed to writing the rebuttals from scratch, the author needs to only drive the reasoning process with minimal intervention, leading an efficient approach with minimal effort and less cognitive load. We compare DEFEND against three other paradigms: (i) Direct rebuttal generation using LLM (DRG), (ii) Segment-wise rebuttal generation using LLM (SWRG), and (iii) Sequential approach (SA) of segment-wise rebuttal generation without author intervention. To enable finegrained evaluation, we extend the ReviewCritique dataset, creating review segmentation, deficiency, error type annotations, rebuttal-action labels, and mapping to gold rebuttal segments. Experimental results and a user study demonstrate that directly using LLMs perform poorly in factual correctness and targeted refutation. Segment-wise generation and the automated sequential approach with author-in-the-loop, substantially improve factual correctness and strength of refutation.

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.

Authors often struggle to interpret peer review feedback, deriving false hope from polite comments or feeling confused by specific low scores. To investigate this, we construct a dataset of over 30,000 ICLR 2021-2025 submissions and compare acceptance prediction performance using numerical scores versus text reviews. Our experiments reveal a significant performance gap: score-based models achieve 91% accuracy, while text-based models reach only 81% even with large language models, indicating that textual information is considerably less reliable. To explain this phenomenon, we first analyze the 9% of samples that score-based models fail to predict, finding their score distributions exhibit high kurtosis and negative skewness, which suggests that individual low scores play a decisive role in rejection even when the average score falls near the borderline. We then examine why text-based accuracy significantly lags behind scores from a review sentiment perspective, revealing the prevalence of the Politeness Principle: reviews of rejected papers still contain more positive than negative sentiment words, masking the true rejection signal and making it difficult for authors to judge outcomes from text alone.

To alleviate the heavy burden of paper screening, researchers increasingly rely on existing AI agents, such as AI reviewers or DeepResearch, for paper evaluation and novelty assessment. However, lacking specialized mechanisms for processing scholarly literature, their analyses often produce superficial results with noticeable deficiencies in quality. To bridge this gap, we introduce MemoNoveltyAgent, a multi-agent system designed to generate comprehensive and faithful novelty reports. Beyond retrieving concrete prior-paper evidence via RAG, our system incorporates a high-level abstract memory constructed from large-scale scholarly corpora. This memory organizes research into hierarchical trees to distill field-specific evolutionary trajectories, thereby providing a broader historical context. Furthermore, we decompose papers into discrete novelty points for fine-grained analysis and retrieval, while employing a self-validation mechanism to improve report faithfulness. Finally, to address the evaluation challenges of such open-ended generation tasks, we propose a RAG-augmented checklist evaluation method that enables reliable and evidence-grounded assessments. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MemoNoveltyAgent outperforms GPT-5 DeepResearch by 13.69%. Code and demo are available at https://github.com/SStan1/MemoNoveltyAgent

Large language models (LLMs) are currently applied to scientific paper evaluation by assigning an absolute score to each paper independently. However, since score scales vary across conferences, time periods, and evaluation criteria, models trained on absolute scores are prone to fitting narrow, context-specific rules rather than developing robust scholarly judgment. To overcome this limitation, we propose shifting paper evaluation from isolated scoring to collaborative ranking. In particular, we design a $\textbf{C}$omparison-$\textbf{N}$ative framework for $\textbf{P}$aper $\textbf{E}$valuation ($\textbf{CNPE}$), integrating comparison into both data construction and model learning. We first propose a graph-based similarity ranking algorithm to facilitate the sampling of more informative and discriminative paper pairs from a collection. We then enhance relative quality judgment through supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning with comparison-based rewards. At inference, the model performs pairwise comparisons over sampled paper pairs and aggregates these preference signals into a global relative quality ranking. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework achieves an average relative improvement of 21.8% over the strong baseline DeepReview-14B, while exhibiting robust generalization to five previously unseen datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/ECNU-Text-Computing/ComparisonReview.

Cross-Context Review (CCR) improves LLM verification by separating production and review into independent sessions. A natural extension is multi-turn review: letting the reviewer ask follow-up questions, receive author responses, and review again. We call this Dynamic Cross-Context Review (D-CCR). In a controlled experiment with 30 artifacts and 150 injected errors, we tested four D-CCR variants against the single-pass CCR baseline. Single-pass CCR (F1 = 0.376) significantly outperformed all multi-turn variants, including D-CCR-2b with question-and-answer exchange (F1 = 0.303, $p < 0.001$, $d = -0.59$). Multi-turn review increased recall (+0.08) but generated 62% more false positives (8.5 vs. 5.2), collapsing precision from 0.30 to 0.20. Two mechanisms drive this degradation: (1) false positive pressure -- reviewers in later rounds fabricate findings when the artifact's real errors have been exhausted, and (2) Review Target Drift -- reviewers provided with prior Q&A exchanges shift from reviewing the artifact to critiquing the conversation itself. Independent re-review without prior context (D-CCR-2c) performed worst (F1 = 0.263), confirming that mere repetition degrades rather than helps. The degradation stems from false positive pressure in additional rounds, not from information amount -- within multi-turn conditions, more information actually helps (D-CCR-2b > D-CCR-2a). The problem is not what the reviewer sees, but that reviewing again invites noise.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used across the scientific workflow, including to draft peer-review reports. However, many AI-generated reviews are superficial and insufficiently actionable, leaving authors without concrete, implementable guidance and motivating the gap this work addresses. We propose RbtAct, which targets actionable review feedback generation and places existing peer review rebuttal at the center of learning. Rebuttals show which reviewer comments led to concrete revisions or specific plans, and which were only defended. Building on this insight, we leverage rebuttal as implicit supervision to directly optimize a feedback generator for actionability. To support this objective, we propose a new task called perspective-conditioned segment-level review feedback generation, in which the model is required to produce a single focused comment based on the complete paper and a specified perspective such as experiments and writing. We also build a large dataset named RMR-75K that maps review segments to the rebuttal segments that address them, with perspective labels and impact categories that order author uptake. We then train the Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct model with supervised fine-tuning on review segments followed by preference optimization using rebuttal derived pairs. Experiments with human experts and LLM-as-a-judge show consistent gains in actionability and specificity over strong baselines while maintaining grounding and relevance.

As AI-assisted grant proposals outpace manual review capacity in a kind of ``Malthusian trap'' for the research ecosystem, this paper investigates the capabilities and limitations of LLM-based grant reviewing for high-stakes evaluation. Using six EPSRC proposals, we develop a perturbation-based framework probing LLM sensitivity across six quality axes: funding, timeline, competency, alignment, clarity, and impact. We compare three review architectures: single-pass review, section-by-section analysis, and a 'Council of Personas' ensemble emulating expert panels. The section-level approach significantly outperforms alternatives in both detection rate and scoring reliability, while the computationally expensive council method performs no better than baseline. Detection varies substantially by perturbation type, with alignment issues readily identified but clarity flaws largely missed by all systems. Human evaluation shows LLM feedback is largely valid but skewed toward compliance checking over holistic assessment. We conclude that current LLMs may provide supplementary value within EPSRC review but exhibit high variability and misaligned review priorities. We release our code and any non-protected data.

Artifact Evaluation (AE) is essential for ensuring the transparency and reliability of research, closing the gap between exploratory work and real-world deployment is particularly important in cybersecurity, particularly in IoT and CPSs, where large-scale, heterogeneous, and privacy-sensitive data meet safety-critical actuation. Yet, manual reproducibility checks are time-consuming and do not scale with growing submission volumes. In this work, we demonstrate that Large Language Models (LLMs) can provide powerful support for AE tasks: (i) text-based reproducibility rating, (ii) autonomous sandboxed execution environment preparation, and (iii) assessment of methodological pitfalls. Our reproducibility-assessment toolkit yields an accuracy of over 72% and autonomously sets up execution environments for 28% of runnable cybersecurity artifacts. Our automated pitfall assessment detects seven prevalent pitfalls with high accuracy ($F_1$ > 92%). Hence, the toolkit significantly reduces reviewer effort and, when integrated into established AE processes, could incentivize authors to submit higher-quality and more reproducible artifacts. IoT, CPS, and cybersecurity conferences and workshops may integrate the toolkit into their peer-review processes to support reviewers' decisions on awarding artifact badges, improving the overall sustainability of the process.

Scientific discoveries must be communicated clearly to realize their full potential. Without effective communication, even the most groundbreaking findings risk being overlooked or misunderstood. The primary way scientists communicate their work and receive feedback from the community is through peer review. However, the current system often provides inconsistent feedback between reviewers, ultimately hindering the improvement of a manuscript and limiting its potential impact. In this paper, we introduce a novel method APRES powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) to update a scientific papers text based on an evaluation rubric. Our automated method discovers a rubric that is highly predictive of future citation counts, and integrate it with APRES in an automated system that revises papers to enhance their quality and impact. Crucially, this objective should be met without altering the core scientific content. We demonstrate the success of APRES, which improves future citation prediction by 19.6% in mean averaged error over the next best baseline, and show that our paper revision process yields papers that are preferred over the originals by human expert evaluators 79% of the time. Our findings provide strong empirical support for using LLMs as a tool to help authors stress-test their manuscripts before submission. Ultimately, our work seeks to augment, not replace, the essential role of human expert reviewers, for it should be humans who discern which discoveries truly matter, guiding science toward advancing knowledge and enriching lives.

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.

Generative AI tools are increasingly entering academic peer review workflows, raising questions about fairness, accountability, and the legitimacy of evaluative judgment. While these systems promise efficiency gains amid growing reviewer overload, their use introduces new sociotechnical risks. This paper presents a convergent mixed-method study combining discourse analysis of 448 social media posts with interviews with 14 area chairs and program chairs from leading AI and HCI conferences to examine how GenAI is discussed and experienced in peer review. Across both datasets, we find broad agreement that GenAI may be acceptable for limited supportive tasks, such as improving clarity or structuring feedback, but that core evaluative judgments, assessing novelty, contribution, and acceptance, should remain human responsibilities. At the same time, participants highlight concerns about epistemic harm, over-standardization, unclear responsibility, and adversarial risks such as prompt injection. User interviews reveal how structural strain and institutional policy ambiguity shift interpretive and enforcement burdens onto individual scholars, disproportionately affecting junior authors and reviewers. By triangulating public governance discourse with lived review practices, this work reframes AI mediated peer review as a sociotechnical governance challenge and offers recommendations for preserving accountability, trust, and meaningful human oversight. Overall, we argue that AI-assisted peer review is best governed not by blanket bans or detection alone, but by explicitly reserving evaluative judgment for humans while instituting enforceable, role-specific controls that preserve accountability. We conclude with role specific recommendations that formalize the support judgment boundary.

Despite frequent double-blind review, systemic biases related to author demographics still disadvantage underrepresented groups. We start from a simple hypothesis: if a post-review recommender is trained with an explicit fairness regularizer, it should increase inclusion without degrading quality. To test this, we introduce Fair-PaperRec, a Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) with a differentiable fairness loss over intersectional attributes (e.g., race, country) that re-ranks papers after double-blind review. We first probe the hypothesis on synthetic datasets spanning high, moderate, and near-fair biases. Across multiple randomized runs, these controlled studies map where increasing the fairness weight strengthens macro/micro diversity while keeping utility approximately stable, demonstrating robustness and adaptability under varying disparity levels. We then carry the hypothesis into the original setting, conference data from ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI), Designing Interactive Systems (DIS), and Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI). In this real-world scenario, an appropriately tuned configuration of Fair-PaperRec achieves up to a 42.03% increase in underrepresented-group participation with at most a 3.16% change in overall utility relative to the historical selection. Taken together, the synthetic-to-original progression shows that fairness regularization can act as both an equity mechanism and a mild quality regularizer, especially in highly biased regimes. By first analyzing the behavior of the fairness parameters under controlled conditions and then validating them on real submissions, Fair-PaperRec offers a practical, equity-focused framework for post-review paper selection that preserves, and in some settings can even enhance, measured scholarly quality.

Automated scholarly paper review (ASPR) has entered the coexistence phase with traditional peer review, where artificial intelligence (AI) systems are increasingly incorporated into real-world manuscript evaluation. In parallel, research on automated and AI-assisted peer review has proliferated. Despite this momentum, empirical progress remains constrained by several critical limitations in existing datasets. While reviewers routinely evaluate figures, tables, and complex layouts to assess scientific claims, most existing datasets remain overwhelmingly text-centric. This bias is reinforced by a narrow focus on data from computer science publications. Furthermore, existing datasets rarely preserve precise alignment between review comments and specific manuscript versions, obscuring the iterative relationship between peer review and manuscript evolution. In response, we introduce FMMD, a multimodal and multidisciplinary open peer review dataset curated from F1000Research. The dataset addresses the current limitations by integrating manuscript-level visual and structural data with version-specific reviewer reports and editorial decisions. By explicitly aligning review comments with the exact article version under review, FMMD enables granular analysis of the peer review lifecycle. Importantly, its coverage of F1000Research extends ASPR research beyond its traditional focus on computer science to a diverse range of scientific disciplines. FMMD supports a range of research tasks, including visual-semantic consistency classification, figure-related review comment generation, and editorial decision prediction based on multimodal manuscript inputs, thereby providing a comprehensive empirical resource for developing and evaluating multimodal ASPR systems and advancing peer review research.

Peer review is central to scientific quality, yet reliance on simple heuristics, namely lazy thinking and non-specific critiques, has threatened review quality. Prior work frames lazy thinking detection as single-label classification and stops at detection, yet review segments often exhibit multiple co-occurring issues, and reviewers benefit more from actionable, guideline-aware feedback than from labels alone. We further show that off-the-shelf LLMs prompted for feedback frequently rewrite the entire review or address the authors rather than the reviewer, motivating an inference-time approach. We introduce an LLM-driven framework that decomposes reviews into argumentative segments, identifies issues violating ACL Rolling Review (ARR) guidelines, and generates targeted feedback using issue-specific templates refined by a novel iterative, reranking-based generation algorithm. In a controlled rewriting study, our feedback reduces guideline violations by up to 92.4%. We also release LazyReviewPlus, the first multi-label dataset of 1,309 sentences annotated for detecting lazy thinking and lack of specificity.

Large language models (LLMs) can generate fluent peer reviews but often miss sparse, subtle, and document-level scientific errors. We introduce PaperAudit-Bench, a benchmark for evaluating paper-level error detection and error-aware automated review. It comprises (1) PaperAudit-Dataset, 220 high-quality AI/ML papers containing more than 2,200 controlled synthetic errors across eight categories, and (2) PaperAudit-Review, an evidence-aware framework that links structured error detection to review generation. Experiments across models, error categories, paper sections, and analysis depths show that sparse long-context auditing remains challenging for current LLMs. Conditioning review generation on explicit, manuscript-grounded error evidence produces more conservative and discriminative assessments that align more closely with human judgments than representative automated-review baselines. The dataset also supports post-training compact detectors through SFT and RL; Qwen3-14B achieves 55.8% F1 at Detection@1 under a fixed held-out protocol. A PubPeer transfer study and deployment in ScienceOne, a scientific foundation-model platform led by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, further illustrate practical applicability. Code and Dataset Page: https://github.com/TU2021/PaperAudit ScienceOne Manuscript Review: https://www.scienceone.cn/lit/#/assistant

The identification and localization of errors is a core task in peer review, yet the exponential growth of scientific output has made it increasingly difficult for human reviewers to reliably detect errors given the limited pool of experts. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have sparked interest in their potential to support such evaluation tasks, from academic peer review to automated scientific assessment. However, despite the growing use of LLMs in review systems, their capabilities to pinpoint errors remain underexplored. In this work, we introduce Fault Localization Across Writing in Science (FLAWS), an automated benchmark consisting of 713 paper-error pairs designed to evaluate how effectively LLMs detect errors that undermine key claims in research papers. We construct the benchmark by systematically inserting claim-invalidating errors into peer-reviewed papers using LLMs, paired with an automated evaluation metric that measures whether models can identify and localize these errors. Developing such a benchmark presents unique challenges that we overcome: ensuring that the inserted errors are well-defined, challenging, and relevant to the content of the paper, avoiding artifacts that would make identification trivial, and designing a scalable, automated evaluation metric. On the resulting benchmark, we evaluate five frontier LLMs: Claude Sonnet 4.5, DeepSeek Reasoner v3.1, Gemini 2.5 Pro, GPT 5, and Grok 4. Among these, GPT 5 is the top-performing model, achieving 39.1% identification accuracy when k=10, where k is the number of top-ranked error text candidates generated by the LLM.

With the rapid advancement of AI models, their deployment across diverse tasks has become increasingly widespread. A notable emerging application is leveraging AI models to assist in reviewing scientific papers. However, recent reports have revealed that some papers contain hidden, injected prompts designed to manipulate AI reviewers into providing overly favorable evaluations. In this work, we present an early systematic investigation into this emerging threat. We propose two classes of attacks: (1) static attack, which employs a fixed injection prompt, and (2) iterative attack, which optimizes the injection prompt against a simulated reviewer model to maximize its effectiveness. Both attacks achieve striking performance, frequently inducing full evaluation scores when targeting frontier AI reviewers. Furthermore, we show that these attacks are robust across various settings. To counter this threat, we explore a simple detection-based defense. While it substantially reduces the attack success rate, we demonstrate that an adaptive attacker can partially circumvent this defense. Our findings underscore the need for greater attention and rigorous safeguards against prompt-injection threats in AI-assisted peer review.