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May 23, 2026cs.CL

How Much Structure Do LLMs Need? Evaluating LLMs for Bibliometric Cluster Description

Large language models (LLMs) can support scientific literature synthesis, but remain prone to hallucinated references, uneven coverage, and weakly grounded thematic organization. We evaluate whether bibliometric structure improves LLM-assisted synthesis by comparing six pipelines for generating cluster descriptions under different levels of evidence and structure. Using 100 published bibliometric analyses, we reconstruct Scopus corpora, extract human-written cluster descriptions, and assess outputs by human alignment, semantic coverage, clustering quality, graph quality, and reference grounding. Results show that LLMs produce descriptions semantically close to human-written ones, but are unreliable when asked to infer bibliometric structure from scratch. Performance improves when bibliometric algorithms define the clusters and the LLM interprets them. Overall, LLM-assisted bibliometric synthesis is most promising as a hybrid workflow in which algorithms provide auditable structure and LLMs generate readable descriptions.
Abraham Camelo-Guerrero, Jairo Diaz-Rodriguez
May 21, 2026cs.MA

Sibyl-AutoResearch: Autonomous Research Needs Self-Evolving Trial-and-Error Harnesses, Not Paper Generators

Autonomous research systems increasingly make the scientific workflow executable: agents can propose ideas, run code, inspect results, and draft papers. But executable workflows do not by themselves produce research judgment. We analyze where current systems lose trial experience: weak evidence becomes prose, pilot signals become broad claims, memory remains textual, and recurring process failures do not change later behavior. We introduce Sibyl-AutoResearch, a self-evolving AutoResearch framework built around Scientific Trial-and-Error Harnesses. A harness lets agents run bounded trials, preserve positive and negative outcomes, and route lessons into later planning, validation, claim scope, scheduling, critique, writing, and harness repair. We formalize this through two auditable conversion units: trial-to-behavior conversion, which links trial signals to later research actions, and trial-to-harness-behavior conversion, which links recurring process failures to system updates. We implement the framework in SIBYL, a file-backed autonomous research system that exposes the state, roles, memory, gates, and artifact traces needed to inspect these conversion paths. A retrospective audit identifies eight high-confidence conversion events, with a median latency of one iteration and a maximum latency of three iterations. A recovered-failure registry further shows how five naturally occurring failure classes, including duplicate results, stale numbers, and unsupported statistics, were blocked, downgraded, or routed into later repair. These traces do not establish a comparative performance claim; they show that the proposed conversion units are recoverable from realistic autonomous-research workspaces. The SIBYL framework and system are available at https://github.com/Sibyl-Research-Team/AutoResearch-SibylSystem.
Chengcheng Wang, Qinhua Xie, Wei He +3
May 21, 2026cs.AI

LLM-Metrics: Measuring Research Impact Through Large Language Model Memory

Citation counts remain the dominant metric for assessing research impact, yet they suffer from well-documented limitations: temporal lag, disciplinary bias, and Matthew effects. Here we propose LLM-Metrics, a research-impact assessment metric derived from the parametric memory of large language models (LLMs). The central hypothesis is that high-impact papers receive greater exposure in the academic community, that this exposure enters LLM training data in textual form, and that models consequently form stronger parametric memory of these papers. We designed four types of multiple-choice probes, covering title recognition, author recognition, method recognition, and venue recognition, and evaluated 549 computer science papers published in 2023-2024 across 17 LLMs spanning 0.5B to 72B parameters from six vendors. Of the 17 models, 15 produced positive predictions, 9 of which were significant at p less than 0.05, with an overall Spearman correlation of rho = 0.1495 and p = 0.0004 against citation counts. Three additional findings support the proposed mechanism. First, the predictive signal was stronger for 2024 papers, rho = 0.1880, whose citation counts were near zero at model-training time, reducing the plausibility of a simple reverse-causality explanation. Second, author-recognition probes showed the strongest discriminative power, consistent with an exposure-driven memory mechanism. Third, model scale and predictive power were non-monotonic: a 3B-parameter model, Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct, with rho = 0.1829, outperformed most larger models, supporting a selective-memory hypothesis in which the limited capacity of smaller models can serve as an effective information filter. LLM-Metrics offers a real-time, cross-disciplinary, citation-independent paradigm for research assessment.
Si Shen, Wenhua Zhao, Danhao Zhu
May 18, 2026cs.AI

How Far Are We From True Auto-Research?

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 ∼\sim15×\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.
Zhengxin Zhang, Ning Wang, Sainyam Galhotra +1
May 18, 2026cs.AI

AI for Auto-Research: Roadmap & User Guide

AI-assisted research is crossing a threshold: fully automated systems can now generate research papers for as little as $15, while long-horizon agents can execute experiments, draft manuscripts, and simulate critique with minimal human input. Yet this productivity frontier exposes a deeper integrity problem: under scientific pressure, even frontier LLMs still fabricate results, miss hidden errors, and fail to judge novelty reliably. Studying developments through April 2026, we present an end-to-end analysis of AI across the complete research lifecycle, organized into four epistemological phases: Creation (idea generation, literature review, coding & experiments, tables & figures), Writing (paper writing), Validation (peer review, rebuttal & revision), and Dissemination (posters, slides, videos, social media, project pages, and interactive agents). We identify a sharp, stage-dependent boundary between reliable assistance and unreliable autonomy: AI excels at structured, retrieval-grounded, and tool-mediated tasks, but remains fragile for genuinely novel ideas, research-level experiments, and scientific judgment. Generated ideas often degrade after implementation, research code lags far behind pattern-matching benchmarks, and end-to-end autonomous systems have not yet consistently reached major-venue acceptance standards. We further show that greater automation can obscure rather than eliminate failure modes, making human-governed collaboration the most credible deployment paradigm. Finally, we provide a structured taxonomy, benchmark suite, and tool inventory, cross-stage design principles, and a practitioner-oriented playbook, with resources maintained at our project page.
Lingdong Kong, Xian Sun, Wei Chow +17
May 18, 2026cs.CL

Infini-News: Efficiently Queryable Access to 1.3 Billion Processed Common Crawl News Articles

Large-scale news corpora support a wide range of research in Computational Social Science and NLP, yet access remains constrained: commercial archives impose prohibitive costs and licensing restrictions, while open alternatives like Common Crawl's CC-News require terabyte-scale storage and computationally intensive processing. We present Infini-News, a retrieval toolkit and index for the entire CC-News archive from August 2016 to the latest available snapshot. Our contributions are threefold. First, we extract, clean the text, and parse the structured metadata of over 1.35B articles. Second, we enrich the corpus with language detection using three frontier language classifiers (GlotLID, lingua, and CommonLingua), and with multi-source geographic attribution that resolves a country of origin for 83.4% of articles across 222 countries. Third, we construct Infini-gram indexes: suffix-array structures that let researchers search the full archive for arbitrary text patterns in sub-second time. Together, these resources lower the barrier to longitudinal, cross-national media research.
Ruggero Marino Lazzaroni, Jana Lasser, Kirill Solovev
May 15, 2026cs.CL

Scaling Accessible Mathematics on arXiv: HTML Conversion and MathML 4

We report on the ongoing development of arXiv's HTML Papers offering, available on every new TeX/LaTeX submission since its initial release in 2023. The main highlights from 2025 and early 2026 are: (i) community-driven improvements to HTML fidelity and service health, with roughly half of 6,000 user reports resolved; (ii) corpus-scale conversion work aimed at 90% error-free HTML (currently 75%); (iii) initial MathML 4 Intent annotations for accessible speech output; (iv) an in-progress Rust port of LaTeXML, reducing compute costs and enabling faster previews on submission. The arXiv HTML Papers project remains experimental, but is gradually maturing as we better understand the needs of arXiv's readers and the technical opportunities presented by new standards and by advances in programming languages and AI.
Deyan Ginev, Brian Caruso, Bruce Miller +2
May 15, 2026cs.SD

vega-mir: An information-theoretic Python toolkit for symbolic music, with applications to harmonic graphs and rubato spectra

We present vega-mir, an open-source Python library that bundles nine information-theoretic and statistical metrics for the analysis of symbolic music corpora behind a small, tested, citable API, and demonstrates two of them at corpus scale in case studies not addressed by the upstream Cygnus paper. Of the nine metrics, three (Shannon entropy, Kullback-Leibler divergence, Zipfian fits) were deployed in the companion Cygnus arXiv preprint; two (network analysis on chord-transition graphs and spectral analysis of rubato curves) are deployed in full case studies here; the four remaining (multi-dimensional Gini, chi-squared stationarity, Higuchi fractal dimension, interval distribution) are validated against analytic anchors and exercised as sanity checks on a bundled 8-composer dataset. The two case studies yield two main observations. First, on the fourteen MAESTRO composers with N >= 10 pieces, the PageRank value of the gravity-centre node correlates with the marginal Kullback-Leibler distance at rho = 0.61 (Spearman, composer-level jackknife N = 14); the categorical gravity-centre identity takes five distinct values across the corpus but is not itself correlated with marginal KL (rho = 0.13, p = 0.21). Second, on the 247-piece Bach multi-master corpus (Schiff, Gould, Richter), Gould holds the highest periodicity ratio of the three performers, not the lowest, inverting the cliché that low scalar rubato reads as "metronomic": Gould's rubato is small in amplitude but structured in time, with a median dominant period of 66 beats against Schiff's 102 and Richter's 104.
Fred Jalbert-Desforges
May 13, 2026cs.CY

Measuring Google AI Overviews: Activation, Source Quality, Claim Fidelity, and Publisher Impact

Google AI Overviews (AIOs) are arguably the most widely encountered deployment of generative AI, reaching over 2 billion users who may not realize the answers they see are AI-generated. Where search engines have traditionally surfaced ranked sources and left users to evaluate them, AIOs synthesize and deliver a single answer - giving Google unprecedented editorial control over what users read and know. We present a large-scale longitudinal measurement study, issuing 55,393 trending queries across 19 topical categories over a 40-day window (March 13 - April 21, 2026). We report four main findings. First, overall AIO activation is 13.7%, rising to 64.7% for question-form queries, while politically sensitive topics see markedly lower rates. Second, AIO-cited domains are more credible than co-displayed first-page results, yet nearly 30% do not appear in those results at all, indicating a source selection mechanism distinct from Google's ranking algorithm. Third, decomposing responses into 98,020 atomic claims, 11.0% are unsupported by the cited pages - with omission the dominant failure mode - and source quality and claim fidelity are largely independent. Fourth, well over half of AIO-cited pages carry display advertising, meaning publishers lose revenue when AIOs suppress the click-through, even as Google's own sponsored ads continue to appear on the same page. Together, these findings document a rapid transformation of the online information ecosystem whose consequences for epistemic security remain poorly understood.
Haofei Xu, Umar Iqbal, Jacob M. Montgomery
May 12, 2026cs.CL

Robust Biomedical Publication Type and Study Design Classification with Knowledge-Guided Perturbations

Accurately and consistently indexing biomedical literature by publication type and study design is essential for supporting evidence synthesis and knowledge discovery. Prior work on automated publication type and study design indexing has primarily focused on expanding label coverage, enriching feature representations, and improving in-domain accuracy, with evaluation typically conducted on data drawn from the same distribution as training. Although pretrained biomedical language models achieve strong performance under these settings, models optimized for in-domain accuracy may rely on superficial lexical or dataset-specific cues, resulting in reduced robustness under distributional shift. In this study, we introduce an evaluation framework based on controlled semantic perturbations to assess the robustness of a publication type classifier and investigate robustness-oriented training strategies that combine entity masking and domain-adversarial training to mitigate reliance on spurious topical correlations. Our results show that the commonly observed trade-off between robustness and in-domain accuracy can be mitigated when robustness objectives are designed to selectively suppress non-task-defining features while preserving salient methodological signals. We find that these improvements arise from two complementary mechanisms: (1) increased reliance on explicit methodological cues when such cues are present in the input, and (2) reduced reliance on spurious domain-specific topical features. These findings highlight the importance of feature-level robustness analysis for publication type and study design classification and suggest that refining masking and adversarial objectives to more selectively suppress topical information may further improve robustness. Data, code, and models are available at: https://github.com/ScienceNLP-Lab/MultiTagger-v2/tree/main/ICHI
Shufan Ming, Joe D. Menke, Neil R. Smalheiser +1
May 11, 2026cs.AI

PaperFit: Vision-in-the-Loop Typesetting Optimization for Scientific Documents

A LaTeX manuscript that compiles without error is not necessarily publication-ready. The resulting PDFs frequently suffer from misplaced floats, overflowing equations, inconsistent table scaling, widow and orphan lines, and poor page balance, forcing authors into repetitive compile-inspect-edit cycles. Rule-based tools are blind to rendered visuals, operating only on source code and log files. Text-only LLMs perform open-loop text editing, unable to predict or verify the two-dimensional layout consequences of their changes. Reliable typesetting optimization therefore requires a visual closed loop with verification after every edit. We formalize this problem as Visual Typesetting Optimization (VTO), the task of transforming a compilable LaTeX paper into a visually polished, page-budget-compliant PDF through iterative visual verification and source-level revision, and introduce a five-category taxonomy of typesetting defects to guide diagnosis. We present PaperFit, a vision-in-the-loop agent that iteratively renders pages, diagnoses defects, and applies constrained repairs. To benchmark VTO, we construct PaperFit-Bench with 200 papers across 10 venue templates and 13 defect types at different difficulty. Extensive experiments show that PaperFit outperforms all baselines by a large margin, establishing that bridging the gap from compilable source to publication-ready PDF requires vision-in-the-loop optimization and that VTO constitutes a critical missing stage in the document automation pipeline.
Bihui Yu, Xinglong Xu, Junjie Jiang +6
May 11, 2026cs.CL

Position: Academic Conferences are Potentially Facing Denominator Gaming Caused by Fully Automated Scientific Agents

The implicit policy of maintaining relatively stable acceptance rates at top AI conferences, despite exponentially growing submissions, introduces a critical structural vulnerability. This position paper characterizes a new systemic threat we term Agentic Denominator Gaming, in which a malicious actor deploys AI agents to generate and submit a large volume of superficially plausible but low-quality papers. Crucially, their objective is not the acceptance of low-quality papers, but rather to inflate the submission denominator and overwhelm reviewing capacity. Under a relatively stable acceptance rate, this dilution can systematically increase the publication probability of a small, targeted set of legitimate papers. We analyze the practical feasibility of this threat and its broader consequences, including intensified reviewer burnout, degraded review quality, and the emergence of industrialized automated agent mills. Finally, we propose and evaluate a range of mitigation strategies, and argue that durable protection will require system-level policy and incentive reforms, rather than relying primarily on technical detection alone.
Rong Shan, Te Gao, Hang Zheng +6
May 10, 2026cs.DL

CheckSupport: A Local LLM-Powered Tool for Automated Manuscript Submission Checklist Selection and Completion

Transparent and standardized reporting is essential for reproducible scientific research, yet adherence to reporting guidelines remains inconsistent because of the manual effort required to select and complete checklists. We present CheckSupport, an open-source, locally deployable system that uses large language models to automate the recommendation of reporting checklists and the evidence-grounded completion of checklists for scientific manuscripts. CheckSupport employs a staged prompting strategy that decomposes reporting workflows into constrained inference tasks, prioritizing faithful extraction over generative text synthesis. All inference is performed locally using instruction-tuned models, preserving data privacy and enabling reproducible, auditable workflows. Evaluated on a corpus of peer-reviewed manuscripts, CheckSupport achieved 90% overall accuracy for checklist recommendations and 88% overall accuracy for item-level completion while operating on CPU-only hardware. On average, the wall-clock time per manuscript was 12.5 seconds, including the checklist recommendation and full checklist completion. These results demonstrate that large language models, when applied as structured inference components, can reduce reporting burden and support more transparent and reproducible scientific reporting across disciplines.
Satvik Tripathi, Don Enwerem, Kevin Song +3
May 10, 2026cs.DL

The Biosecurity Blind Spot: Systematic Dual-use Detection in Open Science Infrastructure

AI is transforming life sciences research at unprecedented speed, accelerating discovery across protein structure prediction, genome modeling, and drug development (Jumper et al., 2021; Mak et al., 2024). Yet this rapid advancement, coupled with the open science movement, introduces significant dual-use research concerns that have received limited empirical scrutiny. Here we present the first systematic analysis of dual-use research of concern (DURC) content on open preprint servers. We screened ~52,000 bioRxiv preprints (2024-2025) using a hybrid pipeline of lexical filtering and large language model (LLM) evaluation, scoring metadata across nine DURC, three PEPP, and five governance categories aligned with U.S. and Australia Group oversight frameworks. Our analysis reveals that dual-use-adjacent knowledge is routinely present in openly accessible titles and abstracts, often exceeding established risk thresholds even in studies with legitimate public health objectives. While this mapping captures surface-level information diffusion, it does not measure operational capability, downstream misuse potential, or the substantial technical and biosafety barriers that constrain harmful application. We argue that institutional review processes, funding requirements, and preprint platform policies must evolve to incorporate proactive, metadata-level monitoring without compromising scientific transparency. Ultimately, harmonizing controlled-access mechanisms for high-risk methodologies with open summaries of scientific contributions offers a pragmatic framework for governing AI-accelerated biology at scale.
Vasudha Sharma, Chakresh Kumar Singh, Jayesh Choudhari +1
May 9, 2026cs.CL

Source or It Didn't Happen: A Multi-Agent Framework for Citation Hallucination Detection

Large language models are increasingly used in scientific writing, yet they can fabricate citation-shaped references that appear plausible but fail bibliographic verification. Existing detectors often reduce verification to binary found/not-found decisions and rely on brittle parsing or incomplete retrieval, offering little field-level signal to auditors. We reframe citation hallucination detection as taxonomy-aligned field-level adjudication and introduce a 12-code taxonomy spanning Real, Potential, and Hallucinated citations. Based on this taxonomy, we build CiteTracer, a cascading multi-agent detector that extracts structured citations from PDF and BibTeX, retrieves evidence through cache lookup, URL fetch, scholar connectors, and web search, applies deterministic field matching, and routes ambiguous cases to class-specialist judgers. We release a benchmark of 2,450 synthetic citations built from real seeds with controlled LLM mutations, paired with 957 real-world fabricated citations drawn from ICLR 2026 and an anonymous conference desk-rejected submissions. CiteTracer reaches 97.1% accuracy on the synthetic benchmark, with class-level F1 scores of 97.0, 95.8, and 98.5 for Real, Potential, and Hallucinated, respectively, and detects 97.1% of fabrications on the real-world set without abstaining. Code: https://github.com/aaFrostnova/CiteTracer.
Mingzhe Li, Zhiqiang Lin, Shiqing Ma
May 8, 2026cs.LG

FAME: Forecasting Academic Impact via Continuous-Time Manifold Evolution

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used to brainstorm and evaluate research ideas, yet assessing such judgments is fundamentally difficult because the true impact of a new idea may take years to emerge. We address this challenge by using the impact forecasting of human-authored manuscripts as a verifiable proxy task. In a prospective forecasting study, we find that frontier LLMs fail to reliably distinguish high-impact papers from ordinary publications, suggesting that static text-based judging is insufficient for scientific evaluation. To address this limitation, we propose FAME\textbf{FAME} (F‾\underline{\text{F}}orecasting A‾\underline{\text{A}}cademic Impact via Continuous-Time M‾\underline{\text{M}}anifold E‾\underline{\text{E}}volution), a spatiotemporal framework for modeling the dynamic trajectories of scientific topics. FAME projects papers into a dynamic latent space informed by textual features and a verified knowledge-flow graph, learning geometric constraints that align impactful manuscripts with the forward momentum of their fields. Experiments on 3,200 arXiv papers across three fast-evolving subfields show that FAME consistently and substantially outperforms state-of-the-art LLM evaluators in prospective multidimensional impact forecasting. Furthermore, integrating FAME's dynamic geometric signals into LLMs significantly improves their forecasting performance. These results support manuscript impact forecasting as a useful, measurable proxy benchmark and position FAME as a strong, trajectory-aware foundation for automated scientific evaluation.
Jianrong Ding, Jianyuan Zhong, Zhengyan Shi +1
May 7, 2026cs.LG

Self-Driving Datasets: From 20 Million Papers to Nuanced Biomedical Knowledge at Scale

Manually curated biomedical repositories -- spanning bioactivity, genomics, and chemistry -- are expensive to maintain, lag behind primary literature, and discard experimental context, obscuring nuances needed to assess data correctness and coverage. We show that PubMed itself can be autonomously and cost-effectively turned into structured datasets that are larger, more nuanced, and more accurate than the curated databases they replace. We present three coupled contributions: (1) an LLM-based entity-tagging pipeline, grounded in nine biomedical ontologies, that tags 4.5B entities across 19 categories in a 22.5M-paper, 2.5T-token PubMed corpus; (2) hybrid sparse-dense retrieval supporting entity-filtered semantic queries over the tagged corpus; and (3) Starling, a multi-agent deep research system that, given only a natural-language task description, designs precision- and recall-targeted retrieval filters, induces an extraction schema, and emits structured records with nuance-rich fields and supporting passages. Across six tasks -- blood-brain barrier permeability, oral bioavailability, acute toxicity (LD50), gene-disease associations, protein subcellular localization, and chemical reactions -- Starling produces ~6.3M records (91K-3M per task); several are, to our knowledge, the largest public datasets for their property. Frontier-model rejection of our extractions is 0.6-7.7% across tasks, far below error rates we measure on widely used curated counterparts (e.g., 16.5% on BBB_Martins, 7.3% on Bioavailability_Ma). Beyond scale and accuracy, the supporting passages carry nuance tabular databases discard -- e.g., oral bioavailability may depend on fed vs. fasted state. Together, the corpus, retrieval, and agent establish a foundation for AI-driven therapeutic design. Code and datasets: https://github.com/starling-labs/starling.
Haydn Jones, Yimeng Zeng, Alden Rose +11
May 7, 2026cs.CL

From Articles to Premises: Building PrimeFacts, an Extraction Methodology and Resource for Fact-Checking Evidence

Fact-checking articles encode rich supporting evidence and reasoning, yet this evidence remains largely inaccessible to automated verification systems due to unstructured presentation. We introduce PrimeFacts, a methodology and resource for extracting fine-grained evidence from full fact-checking articles. We compile 13,106 PolitiFact articles with claims, verdicts, and all referenced sources, and we identify 49,718 in-article hyperlinks as natural anchors to pinpoint key evidence. Our framework leverages large language models (LLMs) to rewrite these anchor sentences into stand-alone, context-independent premises and investigates the extraction of additional implicit evidence. In evaluations on cross-article evidence retrieval and claim verification, the extracted premises substantially improve performance. Decontextualized evidence yields higher retrievability, achieving up to a 30 percent relative gain in Mean Reciprocal Rank over verbatim sentences, and using the evidence for verdict prediction raises Macro-F1 by 10-20 points over the baseline. These gains are consistent across different verdict granularities (2-class vs. 5-class) and model architectures. A qualitative analysis indicates that the decontextualized premises remain faithful to the original sources. Our work highlights the promise of reusing fact-checkers' evidence for automation and provides a large-scale resource of structured evidence from real-world fact-checks.
Premtim Sahitaj, Jawan Kolanowski, Ariana Sahitaj +7
May 6, 2026cs.CR

Shattering the Echo Chamber: Hidden Safeguards in Manuscripts Against the AI Takeover of Peer Review

As LLMs become increasingly capable, editorial boards and program committees are growing concerned about reviewers who fully outsource peer review to commercial chatbots. This concern stems from prior findings that current chatbots lack the independent critical thinking and depth of reasoning required to assess scientific novelty. One promising direction for mitigating this concern is to embed hidden instructions into manuscripts that disrupt or alter chatbot-generated reviews. However, existing methods remain intuitive and fragile, as they typically rely on homogeneous payloads injected in an inter-stream manner, rendering them susceptible to sanitization or neutralization. In this paper, we identify End-to-End Review Outsourcing as an emerging threat and propose IntraGuard, a black-box, venue-agnostic defense framework grounded in the structural--visual decoupling inherent to the PDF. Designed for committee-side deployment, IntraGuard supports both explicit strategies that trigger refusal or warning signals, and implicit strategies that embed predefined textual markers into the generated review. These strategies can be deployed via any of three intra-stream injection mechanisms, each of which seamlessly embeds heterogeneous defensive text objects within the PDF's underlying structure without altering its visual presentation. Extensive evaluations across 7 real-world commercial chatbot settings and 12 venues spanning diverse disciplines show that IntraGuard achieves a defense success rate of up to 84%, while preserving peer-review invariance for human reviewers. IntraGuard is lightweight and hardware-independent, incurring an average overhead of only one second per manuscript on a commodity personal computer. We further evaluate 11 adaptive attacks spanning manuscript sanitization and instruction interference, and discuss the implications of constructing ensemble defenses.
Oubo Ma, Ruixiao Lin, Jiahao Chen +3
May 5, 2026cs.OS

ipc_shared_ptr: A Publish/Subscribe-Aware Smart Pointer for Cross-Process Object Lifetime Management

True zero-copy Inter-Process Communication (IPC) in publish/subscribe (pub/sub) middleware such as Robot Operating System 2 (ROS 2) requires subscribers to reference message objects in publisher-owned shared memory. Objects must not be reclaimed while referenced, yet must eventually be reclaimed, with correct handling of crash recovery and Transient Local QoS retention requirements. We propose ipc_shared_ptr, a pub/sub-aware smart pointer for cross-process message lifetime management. ipc_shared_ptr exploits pub/sub structural properties to specialize Birrell's reference listing, limiting global metadata updates to per-subscriber 0<->1 transitions and achieving an order-of-magnitude reduction in global communication over general-purpose distributed reference counting. We analyze the key metadata management tradeoff: scalability versus implementation simplicity. Owner-driven reclaim offers greater scalability, but concurrent membership changes and reclamation decisions produce races that widen the correctness-verification state space. Single-writer achieves structural atomicity, eliminating this complexity at the cost of a centralized bottleneck. iceoryx2 (owner-driven reclaim) and Agnocast -- a true zero-copy ROS 2 IPC middleware sharing the publisher's heap with subscribers and adopting ipc_shared_ptr with single-writer -- embody each architecture. Comparative evaluation at the scale of Autoware -- the largest open-source ROS 2 application -- confirms that single-writer achieves sufficient scalability: at 200 topics, two subscribers per topic and 100 Hz, Agnocast's E2E p99.9 is 2.9x lower than iceoryx2's, justifying implementation simplicity over owner-driven reclaim.
Takahiro Ishikawa-Aso, Atsushi Yano, Koichi Imai +2
May 5, 2026cs.CY

Frontier Lag: A Bibliometric Audit of Capability Misrepresentation in Academic AI Evaluation

Readers of applied-domain LLM capability evaluations want to know what AI systems can currently do. That literature answers a related, but consequentially different, question: what older, cheaper, less-elicited models could do months or years earlier (a 2026 paper evaluating GPT-3.5 or GPT-4 zero-shot, say, against a frontier of reasoning-capable, tool-using systems like GPT-5.5 Pro and Claude Opus 4.7), often reported with sparse configuration details and abstracted upward into claims about "AI" that propagate through citations, media, and policy. We measure the 'publication elicitation gap' (the gap between these answers) in a pre-registered audit of 112,303 LLM-keyword-matched candidate records (2022-01 to 2026-04; 18,574 admissible, 4,766 full-paper texts retrievable), comparing tested models to the contemporaneous frontier on the Epoch AI Capabilities Index (ECI), reproduced under Arena Elo and Artificial Analysis. The median paper evaluates a model +10.85 ECI (~1.4x the distance between Claude Sonnet 3.7 and Claude Opus 4.5) behind the contemporaneous frontier at evaluation time (H1); an exploratory rational-lag baseline (H8) decomposes this into ~25% peer-review latency, ~75% excess lag. The gap is widening at +5.53 ECI/year (H2; 95% CI [+5.03, +5.83]). Meanwhile, only 3.2% of abstracts (21.2% of full-texts) disclose reasoning-mode status on reasoning-capable models (H4) and 52.5% (95% CI [48.2, 56.9]) state conclusions at the level of "AI" rather than the evaluated model(s), rising at OR = 1.23/year. Proposed remedies include API-access subsidies and editorial enforcement of reporting frameworks mandating configuration-surface disclosure (model snapshot, reasoning mode/effort, tool access, scaffolding, prompting, etc.); VERSIO-AI is a 13-item checklist (Core 3 desk-reject) extending existing frameworks at the elicitation surface, with per-DOI analysis at frontierlag.org.
David Gringras, Misha Salahshoor
May 5, 2026cs.DL

A Skill-Based AI Agentic Pipeline for Library of Congress Subject Indexing

This paper presents a modular AI agentic skill pipeline for automating subject indexing with Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH). Subject indexing - the process of analyzing a work's aboutness, selecting controlled vocabulary terms, and encoding them as MARC21 subject access fields - is one of the most time-consuming components of library cataloging. The system decomposes this process into four discrete, sequentially executed agent skills: conceptual analysis, quantitative filtering, authority validation, and MARC field synthesis. Each skill encodes domain knowledge drawn directly from Library of Congress Subject Headings Manual (SHM) instruction sheets and subject analysis theory. The pipeline was evaluated against a corpus of ten titles whose existing subject headings were captured from the Harvard Library bibliographic dataset (a snapshot of their Alma ILS). Results demonstrate strong conceptual alignment with professional subject indexing practice, with notable differences in specificity, subdivision practice, and the agent's adherence to the 2026 LC policy discontinuing form subdivisions in favor of LCGFT 655 fields.
Eric H. C. Chow
May 4, 2026cs.AI

Stop Automating Peer Review Without Rigorous Evaluation

Large language models offer a tempting solution to address the peer review crisis. This position paper argues that today's AI systems should not be used to produce paper reviews. We ground this position in an empirical comparison of human- versus AI-generated ICLR 2026 reviews and an evaluation of the effect of automated paper rewriting on different AI reviewers. We identify two critical issues: 1) AI reviewers exhibit a hivemind effect of excessive agreement within and across papers that reduces perspective diversity. 2) AI review scores are trivially gameable through paper laundering: prompting an LLM to rewrite a paper could significantly increase the scores from AI reviewers, demonstrating that LLM reviewers are easy to game through stylistic changes rather than scientific results. However, non-gameability and review diversity are necessary but not sufficient conditions for automation. We argue that addressing the peer review crisis requires a science of peer review automation -- not general-purpose LLMs deployed without rigorous evaluation.
Joachim Baumann, Jiaxin Pei, Sanmi Koyejo +1
Apr 30, 2026cs.DL

Measuring research data reuse in scholarly publications using generative artificial intelligence: Open Science Indicator development and preliminary results

Numerous metascience studies and other initiatives have begun to monitor the prevalence of open science practices when it is more important to understand the 'downstream' effects or impacts of open science. PLOS and DataSeer have developed a new LLM-based indicator to measure an important effect of open science: the reuse of research data. Our results show a data reuse rate of 43%, which is higher than established bibliometric techniques. We show that data reuse can be measured at scale using LLMs and generative artificial intelligence. The positive effects of research data sharing and reuse may currently be underestimated.
Lauren Cadwallader, Iain Hrynaszkiewicz, parth sarin +1
Apr 28, 2026cs.CY

Large language models eroding science understanding: an empirical study of malignment

This paper is accepted and in press for AI and Ethics. This paper includes the supplementary data file at the end of the manuscript. This study examines whether large language models (LLMs) can reliably answer scientific questions and demonstrates how easily they can be influenced by fringe scientific material. The authors modified custom LLMs to prioritise knowledge in selected fringe papers on the Fine Structure Constant and Gravitational Waves, then compared their responses with those of domain experts and standard LLMs. The altered models produced fluent, convincing answers that contradicted scientific consensus and were difficult for non-experts to detect as misleading. The results show that LLMs are vulnerable to manipulation and cannot replace expert judgment, highlighting risks for public understanding of science and the potential spread of misinformation.
Harry Collins, Hartmut Grote, Paul Newbury +2
Apr 27, 2026cs.LG

CiteRadar: A Citation Intelligence Platform for Researcher Profiling and Geographic Visualization

Understanding the geographic reach and community structure of one's scholarly citations is increasingly valuable for career development, grant applications, and collaboration discovery -- yet accessible tools for answering these questions remain scarce. Existing bibliometric platforms either require costly institutional subscriptions or expose only aggregate citation counts without granular per-author metadata. We present CiteRadar, an open-source system that accepts a single Google Scholar user identifier and automatically produces a structured output folder containing: the author's complete publication list, all retrieved citing papers with enriched author metadata, two ranked author tables (by citation frequency and by h-index), a plain-text statistical summary, and a self-contained interactive HTML world map -- all from a single command-line invocation. CiteRadar integrates five heterogeneous data sources -- Google Scholar, OpenAlex, CrossRef, Semantic Scholar, and OpenStreetMap Nominatim -- through a carefully engineered five-stage pipeline. Key technical contributions include: (1) a Scholar meta-string parser resilient to Unicode non-breaking-space separators, a pervasive but undocumented quirk in Scholar's HTML that silently corrupts venue and year fields when unhandled; (2) a two-stage author disambiguation system using stop-word-filtered institution name similarity to guard against the well-known same-name entity-merging failure mode in bibliometric databases, demonstrated to eliminate h-index attribution errors of up to 9x the correct value; (3) an OpenAlex web-URL to API-URL conversion fix that raises the fraction of author records with city-level location data from 0% to ~60%; and (4) a logarithmically-scaled interactive Folium world map with per-city researcher popups, rendered as a fully self-contained HTML file.
Chenxu Niu, Yiming Sun
Apr 27, 2026cs.LG

The Last Human-Written Paper: Agent-Native Research Artifacts

Scientific publication compresses a branching, iterative research process into a linear narrative, discarding the majority of what was discovered along the way. This compilation imposes two structural costs: a Storytelling Tax, where failed experiments, rejected hypotheses, and the branching exploration process are discarded to fit a linear narrative; and an Engineering Tax, where the gap between reviewer-sufficient prose and agent-sufficient specification leaves critical implementation details unwritten. Tolerable for human readers, these costs become critical when AI agents must understand, reproduce, and extend published work. We introduce the Agent-Native Research Artifact (ARA), a protocol that replaces the narrative paper with a machine-executable research package structured around four layers: scientific logic, executable code with full specifications, an exploration graph that preserves the failures compilation discards, and evidence grounding every claim in raw outputs. Three mechanisms support the ecosystem: a Live Research Manager that captures decisions and dead ends during ordinary development; an ARA Compiler that translates legacy PDFs and repos into ARAs; and an ARA-native review system that automates objective checks so human reviewers can focus on significance, novelty, and taste. On PaperBench and RE-Bench, ARA raises question-answering accuracy from 72.4% to 93.7% and reproduction success from 57.4% to 64.4%. On RE-Bench's five open-ended extension tasks, preserved failure traces in ARA accelerate progress, but can also constrain a capable agent from stepping outside the prior-run box depending on the agent's capabilities. Our code is open-sourced at https://github.com/Orchestra-Research/Agent-Native-Research-Artifact.
Jiachen Liu, Jiaxin Pei, Jintao Huang +34
Apr 26, 2026cs.AI

When AI reviews science: Can we trust the referee?

The volume of scientific submissions continues to climb, outpacing the capacity of qualified human referees and stretching editorial timelines. At the same time, modern large language models (LLMs) offer impressive capabilities in summarization, fact checking, and literature triage, making the integration of AI into peer review increasingly attractive -- and, in practice, unavoidable. Yet early deployments and informal adoption have exposed acute failure modes. Recent incidents have revealed that hidden prompt injections embedded in manuscripts can steer LLM-generated reviews toward unjustifiably positive judgments. Complementary studies have also demonstrated brittleness to adversarial phrasing, authority and length biases, and hallucinated claims. These episodes raise a central question for scholarly communication: when AI reviews science, can we trust the AI referee? This paper provides a security- and reliability-centered analysis of AI peer review. We map attacks across the review lifecycle -- training and data retrieval, desk review, deep review, rebuttal, and system-level. We instantiate this taxonomy with four treatment-control probes on a stratified set of ICLR 2025 submissions, using two advanced LLM-based referees to isolate the causal effects of prestige framing, assertion strength, rebuttal sycophancy, and contextual poisoning on review scores. Together, this taxonomy and experimental audit provide an evidence-based baseline for assessing and tracking the reliability of AI peer review and highlight concrete failure points to guide targeted, testable mitigations.
Jialiang Wang, Yuchen Liu, Hang Xu +7
Apr 24, 2026cs.CY

Smaller, Younger, and More Impactful: How AI-Assisted Writing Transforms Research Teams

The era of Big Science has long been defined by increasingly large and specialized research teams pushing the frontiers of knowledge. However, recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly large language models (LLMs), are beginning to reshape academic writing and scientific research, potentially disrupting the longstanding trend toward ever-larger teams and transforming other dimensions of research team structure. Drawing on 147,074 full-text publications from the PLoS family and the Nature portfolio since 2020, we examined whether and how AI-assisted writing influences team structure and team outcomes in science. Using multiple methods, including ordinary least square, quantile regression, Poisson regression, logistic regression and propensity score matching, we found that research teams using AI-assisted writing tend to be younger and smaller. Importantly, this shift toward more compact, junior-leaning teams does not come at the expense of scientific impact. On the contrary, we observed a higher probability of research teams that employed AI-assisted writing producing highly impactful publications. These results highlight the significant role of AI-assisted writing in reshaping not only how research is produced, but also how research teams are formed and assembled. Our findings call for policy improvements in research evaluation, funding, and training to address this emerging trend.
Haoyang Wang, Mingze Zhang, Yi Bu +2
Apr 24, 2026cs.CL

TexOCR: Advancing Document OCR Models for Compilable Page-to-LaTeX Reconstruction

Existing document OCR largely targets plain text or Markdown, discarding the structural and executable properties that make LaTeX essential for scientific publishing. We study page-level reconstruction of scientific PDFs into compilable LaTeX and introduce TexOCR-Bench, a benchmark, and TexOCR-Train, a large-scale training corpus, for this task. TexOCR-Bench features a multi-dimensional evaluation suite that jointly assesses transcription fidelity, structural faithfulness, and end-to-end compilability. Leveraging TexOCR-Train, we train a 2B-parameter model, TexOCR, using supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL) with verifiable rewards derived from LaTeX unit tests that directly enforce compilability and referential integrity. Experiments across 21 frontier models on TexOCR-Bench show that existing systems frequently violate key document invariants, including consistent section structure, correct float placement, and valid label-reference links, which undermines compilation reliability and downstream usability. Our analysis further reveals that RL with verifiable rewards yields consistent improvements over SFT alone, particularly on structural and compilation metrics.
Chengye Wang, Lin Fu, Zexi Kuang +1
Apr 23, 2026cs.AI

Rethinking Publication: A Certification Framework for AI-Enabled Research

AI research pipelines can now generate academic work that may satisfy existing peer review standards for quality, novelty, and methodological rigor. However, the publication system was built around the assumption that research is produced by human authors. It therefore lacks a clear way to evaluate work when the knowledge claim may be valid but the producer is partly or fully automated. This paper proposes a two-layer certification framework for AI-generated research. The first layer evaluates whether the knowledge claim is sound. The second layer evaluates the level of human contribution. This separation allows journals and conferences to assess pipeline-generated work more consistently without creating new institutions. The framework uses normative analysis, conceptual design, and dry-run validation against representative submission cases. It classifies human contribution into three categories: Category A, where the work is reachable by an automated pipeline; Category B, where human direction is required at identifiable stages; and Category C, where the work goes beyond current pipeline capability, especially at the problem-formulation stage. The paper also proposes dedicated benchmark slots for fully disclosed automated research. These slots would provide a transparent publication path and help reviewers calibrate judgments over time. The key argument is that publication has historically certified two things at once: that the knowledge is valid and that a human produced it. AI research pipelines separate these two claims. By decoupling knowledge certification from authorship attribution, the proposed framework responds to a structural change already underway. It can be implemented within existing editorial systems, works even when attribution is uncertain, and recognizes human frontier contribution based on epistemic value rather than human origin alone.
Yang Lu, Rabimba Karanjai, Lei Xu +1
Apr 23, 2026cs.AI

Read the Paper, Write the Code: Agentic Reproduction of Social-Science Results

Recent work has used LLM agents to reproduce empirical social science results with access to both the data and code. We broaden this scope by asking: Can they reproduce results given only a paper's methods description and original data? We develop an agentic reproduction system that extracts structured methods descriptions from papers, runs reimplementations under strict information isolation -- agents never see the original code, results, or paper -- and enables deterministic, cell-level comparison of reproduced outputs to the original results. An error attribution step traces discrepancies through the system chain to identify root causes. Evaluating four agent scaffolds and four LLMs on 48 papers with human-verified reproducibility, we find that agents can largely recover published results, but performance varies substantially between models, scaffolds, and papers. Root cause analysis reveals that failures stem both from agent errors and from underspecification in the papers themselves.
Benjamin Kohler, David Zollikofer, Johanna Einsiedler +2
Apr 23, 2026cs.IR

A Large-Scale, Cross-Disciplinary Corpus of Systematic Reviews

Existing benchmarks for systematic reviewing remain limited either in scale or in disciplinary coverage, with some collections comprising only a modest number of topics and others focusing primarily on biomedical research. We present Webis-SR4ALL-26, a large-scale, cross-disciplinary corpus of 301,871 systematic reviews spanning all scientific fields as covered by OpenAlex. Using a multi-stage pre-processing pipeline, we link reviews to resolved OpenAlex metadata and reference lists and extract, when explicitly reported, structured method artifacts relevant to retrieval and screening. These artifacts include reported search strategies (Boolean queries or keyword lists) that we normalize into executable approximations, as well as reported inclusion and exclusion criteria. Together, these layers support cross-domain benchmarking of retrieval and screening components against review reference lists, training and evaluation of extraction methods for review artifacts, and comparative meta-science analyses of systematic review practices across disciplines and time. To demonstrate one concrete use case, we report large-scale baseline retrieval signals by executing normalized search strategies in OpenAlex and comparing retrieved sets to resolved reference lists. We release the corpus and the pre-processing pipeline, along with code used for extraction validation and the retrieval demonstration.
Pierre Achkar, Tim Gollub, Arno Simons +2
Apr 22, 2026cs.AI

pAI/MSc: ML Theory Research with Humans on the Loop

We present pAI/MSc, an open-source, customizable, modular multi-agent system for academic research workflows. Our goal is not autonomous scientific ideation, nor fully automated research. It is narrower and more practical: to reduce by orders of magnitude the human steering required to turn a specified hypothesis into a literature-grounded, mathematically established, experimentally supported, submission-oriented manuscript draft. pAI/MSc is built with a current emphasis on machine learning theory and adjacent quantitative fields.
Mahmoud Abdelmoneum, Pierfrancesco Beneventano, Tomaso Poggio
Apr 22, 2026cs.CL

Construction of a Battery Research Knowledge Graph using a Global Open Catalog

Battery research is a rapidly growing and highly interdisciplinary field, making it increasingly difficult to track relevant expertise and identify potential collaborators across institutional boundaries. In this work, we present a pipeline for constructing an author-centric knowledge graph of battery research built on OpenAlex, a large-scale open bibliographic catalogue. For each author, we derive a weighted research descriptors vector that combines coarse-grained OpenAlex concepts with fine-grained keyphrases extracted from titles and abstracts using KeyBERT with ChatGPT (gpt-3.5-turbo) as the backend model, selected after evaluating multiple alternatives. Vector components are weighted by research descriptor origin, authorship position, and temporal recency. The framework is applied to a corpus of 189,581 battery-related works. The resulting vectors support author-author similarity computation, community detection, and exploratory search through a browser-based interface. The knowledge graph is then serialized in RDF and linked to Wikidata identifiers, making it interoperable with external linked open data sources and extensible beyond the battery domain. Unlike prior author-centric analyses confined to institutional repositories, our approach operates at cross-institutional scale and grounds similarity in domain semantics rather than citation or co-authorship structure alone.
Luca Foppiano, Sae Dieb, Malik Zain +3
Apr 21, 2026cs.IR

Enhancing Unsupervised Keyword Extraction in Academic Papers through Integrating Highlights with Abstract

Automatic keyword extraction from academic papers is a key area of interest in natural language processing and information retrieval. Although previous research has mainly focused on utilizing abstract and references for keyword extraction, this paper focuses on the highlights section - a summary describing the key findings and contributions, offering readers a quick overview of the research. Our observations indicate that highlights contain valuable keyword information that can effectively complement the abstract. To investigate the impact of incorporating highlights into unsupervised keyword extraction, we evaluate three input scenarios: using only the abstract, the highlights, and a combination of both. Experiments conducted with four unsupervised models on Computer Science (CS), Library and Information Science (LIS) datasets reveal that integrating the abstract with highlights significantly improves extraction performance. Furthermore, we examine the differences in keyword coverage and content between abstract and highlights, exploring how these variations influence extraction outcomes. The data and code are available at https://github.com/xiangyi-njust/Highlight-KPE.
Yi Xiang, Chengzhi Zhang
Apr 20, 2026cs.IR

Document-as-Image Representations Fall Short for Scientific Retrieval

Many recent document embedding models are trained on document-as-image representations, embedding rendered pages as images rather than the underlying source. Meanwhile, existing benchmarks for scientific document retrieval, such as ArXivQA and ViDoRe, treat documents as images of pages, implicitly favoring such representations. In this work, we argue that this paradigm is not well-suited for text-rich multimodal scientific documents, where critical evidence is distributed across structured sources, including text, tables, and figures. To study this setting, we introduce ArXivDoc, a new benchmark constructed from the underlying LaTeX sources of scientific papers. Unlike PDF or image-based representations, LaTeX provides direct access to structured elements (e.g., sections, tables, figures, equations), enabling controlled query construction grounded in specific evidence types. We systematically compare text-only, image-based, and multimodal representations across both single-vector and multi-vector retrieval models. Our results show that: (1) document-as-image representations are consistently suboptimal, especially as document length increases; (2) text-based representations are most effective, even for figure-based queries, by leveraging captions and surrounding context; and (3) interleaved text+image representations outperform document-as-image approaches without requiring specialized training.
Ghazal Khalighinejad, Raghuveer Thirukovalluru, Alexander H. Oh +1
Apr 18, 2026cs.CL

SciImpact: A Multi-Dimensional, Multi-Field Benchmark for Scientific Impact Prediction

The rapid growth of scientific literature calls for automated methods to assess and predict research impact. Prior work has largely focused on citation-based metrics, leaving limited evaluation of models' capability to reason about other impact dimensions. To this end, we introduce SciImpact, a large-scale, multi-dimensional benchmark for scientific impact prediction spanning 19 fields. SciImpact captures various forms of scientific influence, ranging from citation counts to award recognition, media attention, patent reference, and artifact adoption, by integrating heterogeneous data sources and targeted web crawling. It comprises 215,928 contrastive paper pairs reflecting meaningful impact differences in both short-term (e.g., Best Paper Award) and long-term settings (e.g., Nobel Prize). We evaluate 11 widely used large language models (LLMs) on SciImpact. Results show that off-the-shelf models exhibit substantial variability across dimensions and fields, while multi-task supervised fine-tuning consistently enables smaller LLMs (e.g., 4B) to markedly outperform much larger models (e.g., 30B) and surpass powerful closed-source LLMs (e.g., o4-mini). These results establish SciImpact as a challenging benchmark and demonstrate its value for multi-dimensional, multi-field scientific impact prediction. Our project homepage is https://flypig23.github.io/sciimpact-homepage/
Hangxiao Zhu, Yuyu Zhang, Ping Nie +1
Apr 18, 2026cs.CL

Bolzano: Case Studies in LLM-Assisted Mathematical Research

We report new results on eight problems in mathematics and theoretical computer science, produced with the assistance of Bolzano, an open-source multi-agent LLM system. Bolzano orchestrates rounds of interaction between parallel prover agents and a verifier agent while maintaining a persistent knowledge base that is carried across rounds. Classified using the significance-autonomy taxonomy of Feng et al., six of the eight results reach the level of publishable research, and five of the eight were produced essentially autonomously by Bolzano. Our results provide evidence that LLMs can contribute meaningfully to mathematical research, complementing recent reports by Bubeck et al., Woodruff et al., and others.
Martin Balko, Jan Grebík, Pavel Hubáček +5
Apr 17, 2026cs.ET

The Relic Condition: When Published Scholarship Becomes Material for Its Own Replacement

We extracted the scholarly reasoning systems of two internationally prominent humanities and social science scholars from their published corpora alone, converted those systems into structured inference-time constraints for a large language model, and tested whether the resulting scholar-bots could perform core academic functions at expert-assessed quality. The distillation pipeline used an eight-layer extraction method and a nine-module skill architecture grounded in local, closed-corpus analysis. The scholar-bots were then deployed across doctoral supervision, peer review, lecturing and panel-style academic exchange. Expert assessment involved three senior academics producing reports and appointment-level syntheses. Across the preserved expert record, all review and supervision reports judged the outputs benchmark-attaining, appointment-level recommendations placed both bots at or above Senior Lecturer level in the Australian university system, and recovered panel scores placed Scholar A between 7.9 and 8.9/10 and Scholar B between 8.5 and 8.9/10 under multi-turn debate conditions. A research-degree-student survey showed high performance ratings across information reliability, theoretical depth and logical rigor, with pronounced ceiling effects on a 7-point scale, despite all participants already being frontier-model users. We term this the Relic condition: when publication systems make stable reasoning architectures legible, extractable and cheaply deployable, the public record of intellectual labor becomes raw material for its own functional replacement. Because the technical threshold for this transition is already crossed at modest engineering effort, we argue that the window for protective frameworks covering disclosure, consent, compensation and deployment restriction is the present, while deployment remains optional rather than infrastructural.
Lin Deng, Chang-bo Liu
Apr 17, 2026cs.CV

From Articles to Canopies: Knowledge-Driven Pseudo-Labelling for Tree Species Classification using LLM Experts

Hyperspectral tree species classification is challenging due to limited and imbalanced class labels, spectral mixing (overlapping light signatures from multiple species), and ecological heterogeneity (variability among ecological systems). Addressing these challenges requires methods that integrate biological and structural characteristics of vegetation, such as canopy architecture and interspecific interactions, rather than relying solely on spectral signatures. This paper presents a biologically informed, semi-supervised deep learning method that integrates multi-sensor Earth observation data, specifically hyperspectral imaging (HSI) and airborne laser scanning (ALS), with expert, ecological knowledge. The approach relies on biologically inspired pseudo-labelling over a precomputed canopy graph, yielding accurate classification at low training cost. In addition, ecological priors on species cohabitation are automatically derived from reliable sources using large language models (LLMs) and encoded as a cohabitation matrix with likelihoods of species occurring together. These priors are incorporated into the pseudo-labelling strategy, effectively introducing expert knowledge into the model. Experiments on a real-world forest dataset demonstrate 5.6% improvement over the best reference method. Expert evaluation of cohabitation priors reveals high accuracy with differences no larger than 15%.
Michał Romaszewski, Dominik Kopeć, Michał Cholewa +6
Apr 16, 2026cs.AI

The Agentification of Scientific Research: A Physicist's Perspective

This article argues that the most important significance of the AI revolution, especially the rise of large language models, lies not simply in automation, but in a fundamental change in how complex information and human know-how are carried, replicated, and shared. From this perspective, AI for Science is especially important because it may transform not only the efficiency of research, but also the structure of scientific collaboration, discovery, publishing, and evaluation. The article outlines a gradual path from AI as a research tool to AI as a scientific collaborator, and discusses how AI is likely to fundamentally reshape scientific publication. It also argues that continuous learning and diversity of ideas are essential if AI is to play a meaningful role in original scientific discovery.
Xiao-Liang Qi
Apr 16, 2026cs.CL

NLP needs Diversity outside of 'Diversity'

This position paper argues that recent progress with diversity in NLP is disproportionately concentrated on a small number of areas surrounding fairness. We further argue that this is the result of a number of incentives, biases, and barriers which come together to disenfranchise marginalized researchers in non-fairness fields, or to move them into fairness-related fields. We substantiate our claims with an investigation into the demographics of NLP researchers by subfield, using our research to support a number of recommendations for ensuring that all areas within NLP can become more inclusive and equitable. In particular, we highlight the importance of breaking down feedback loops that reinforce disparities, and the need to address geographical and linguistic barriers that hinder participation in NLP research.
Joshua Tint
Mar 30, 2026cs.AI

Working Paper: Towards a Category-theoretic Comparative Framework for Artificial General Intelligence

AGI has become the Holly Grail of AI with the promise of level intelligence and the major Tech companies around the world are investing unprecedented amounts of resources in its pursuit. Yet, there does not exist a single formal definition and only some empirical AGI benchmarking frameworks currently exist. The main purpose of this paper is to develop a general, algebraic and category theoretic framework for describing, comparing and analysing different possible AGI architectures. Thus, this Category theoretic formalization would also allow to compare different possible candidate AGI architectures, such as, RL, Universal AI, Active Inference, CRL, Schema based Learning, etc. It will allow to unambiguously expose their commonalities and differences, and what is even more important, expose areas for future research. From the applied Category theoretic point of view, we take as inspiration Machines in a Category to provide a modern view of AGI Architectures in a Category. More specifically, this first position paper provides, on one hand, a first exercise on RL, Causal RL and SBL Architectures in a Category, and on the other hand, it is a first step on a broader research program that seeks to provide a unified formal foundation for AGI systems, integrating architectural structure, informational organization, agent realization, agent and environment interaction, behavioural development over time, and the empirical evaluation of properties. This framework is also intended to support the definition of architectural properties, both syntactic and informational, as well as semantic properties of agents and their assessment in environments with explicitly characterized features. We claim that Category Theory and AGI will have a very symbiotic relation.
Pablo de los Riscos, Fernando J. Corbacho, Michael A. Arbib
Mar 23, 2026cs.DL

Research Novelty in Information Systems Journals After ChatGPT: Differences Across Institutional Language Contexts

Large language models are increasingly used in scholarly work, yet it remains unclear whether their productivity gains are accompanied by changes in research novelty. We examine how relative abstract-level semantic novelty in Information Systems journals changed after ChatGPT became widely available and whether this change differed across institutional language contexts. We analyze 13,847 articles published from 2020 to 2025 in 44 A* and A Information Systems journals. Using SPECTER2 representations of titles and abstracts, we measure each article's semantic distance from its nearest recent predecessors and estimate a comparative pre/post model. Articles whose first authors were affiliated with institutions in non-English-dominant countries show a 0.176 standard deviation larger post-2022 decline in relative semantic novelty than articles from English-dominant affiliations, equivalent to about 7 percentile points. The pattern is similar across several alternative specifications, although the balanced-author estimate is less precise. We interpret this finding through a tension in generative AI-supported knowledge work. GenAI can widen access to prior knowledge and support new combinations, but it can also make established frames easier to reproduce. Because individual LLM use is not observed, the result identifies a heterogeneous post-2022 shift rather than an effect of LLM adoption. The study extends research on LLMs and scholarly productivity by shifting attention from publication counts to the semantic positioning of published articles and by showing that post-2022 change differs across institutional contexts.
Ali Safari, Sahar Babaei
Mar 9, 2026cs.CL

Supporting Workflow Reproducibility by Linking Bioinformatics Tools across Papers and Executable Code

Motivation: The rapid growth of biological data has intensified the need for transparent, reproducible, and well-documented computational workflows. The ability to clearly connect the steps of a workflow in the code with their description in a paper would improve workflow comprehension, support reproducibility, and facilitate reuse. This task requires the linking of bioinformatics tools in workflow code with their mentions in a published workflow description. Results: We present CoPaLink, an automated approach that integrates three components: named entity recognition (NER) for identifying tool mentions in scientific text, NER for tool mentions in workflow code, and entity resolution based on word embedding similarity. We propose approaches for all three steps, achieving a high individual F1-measure (77 - 90) and a joint accuracy of 66 when evaluated on Nextflow workflows using Sentence-BERT. CoPaLink leverages corpora of scientific articles and workflow executable code with curated tool annotations to bridge the gap between narrative descriptions and workflow implementations. Availability: The code is available at https://gitlab.liris.cnrs.fr/sharefair/copalink-experiments and https://gitlab.liris.cnrs.fr/sharefair/copalink. The corpora are also available: CPL-Article (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20746904), CPL-Code (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20746970) and CPL-Gold-Entity-Resolution (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20746994).
Clémence Sebe, Olivier Ferret, Aurélie Névéol +3
Jan 21, 2026cs.DL

The Rise of Large Language Models and the Direction and Impact of US Federal Research Funding

Federal research funding shapes the direction, diversity, and impact of the US scientific enterprise. Large language models (LLMs) are rapidly diffusing into scientific practice, holding substantial promise while raising widespread concerns. Despite growing attention to AI use in scientific writing and evaluation, little is known about how the rise of LLMs is reshaping the public funding landscape. Here, we examine LLM involvement at key stages of the federal funding pipeline by combining two complementary data sources: confidential National Science Foundation (NSF) and National Institutes of Health (NIH) proposal submissions from two large US R1 universities, including funded, unfunded, and pending proposals, and the full population of publicly released NSF and NIH awards. We find that LLM use rises sharply beginning in 2023 and exhibits a bimodal distribution, indicating a clear split between minimal and substantive use. Across both private submissions and public awards, higher LLM involvement is consistently associated with lower semantic distinctiveness, positioning projects closer to recently funded work within the same agency. The consequences of this shift are agency-dependent. LLM use is positively associated with proposal success and higher early-stage publication output at NIH, whereas no comparable associations are observed at NSF. Notably, the productivity gains at NIH are concentrated in non-hit papers rather than the most highly cited work. Together, these findings provide large-scale evidence that the rise of LLMs is reshaping how scientific ideas are positioned, selected, and translated into publicly funded research, with implications for portfolio governance, research diversity, and the long-run impact of science.
Yifan Qian, Zhe Wen, Alexander C. Furnas +3
Jan 19, 2026cs.DL

LLM-Generated or Human-Written? Comparing Review and Non-Review Papers on ArXiv

ArXiv recently prohibited the upload of unpublished review papers to its servers in the Computer Science domain, citing a high prevalence of LLM-generated content in these categories. However, this decision was not accompanied by quantitative evidence. In this work, we investigate this claim by measuring the proportion of LLM-generated content in review vs. non-review research papers in recent years. Using two high-quality detection methods, we find a substantial increase in LLM-generated content across both review and non-review papers, with a higher prevalence in review papers. However, when considering the number of LLM-generated papers published in each category, the estimates of non-review LLM-generated papers are almost six times higher. Furthermore, we find that this policy will affect papers in certain domains far more than others, with the CS subdiscipline Computers & Society potentially facing cuts of 50%. Our analysis provides an evidence-based framework for evaluating such policy decisions, and we release our code to facilitate future investigations at: https://github.com/yanaiela/llm-review-arxiv.
Yanai Elazar, Maria Antoniak
Jan 19, 2026cs.CL

RegCheck: A tool for structured comparisons between study registrations and papers

Across the social and medical sciences, researchers recognize that specifying planned research activities (i.e., 'registration') prior to the commencement of research has benefits for both the transparency and rigour of science. Despite this, evidence suggests that study registrations frequently go unexamined, minimizing their effectiveness. In a way this is no surprise: manually checking registrations against papers is labour- and time-intensive, requiring careful reading across formats and expertise across domains. The advent of AI unlocks new possibilities in facilitating this activity. We present RegCheck, a modular LLM-assisted tool designed to help researchers, reviewers, and editors from across scientific disciplines compare study registrations with their corresponding papers. Importantly, RegCheck keeps human expertise and judgement in the loop by (i) ensuring that users are the ones who determine which features should be compared, and (ii) presenting the most relevant text associated with each feature to the user, facilitating (rather than replacing) human discrepancy judgements. RegCheck also generates shareable reports with unique RegCheck IDs, enabling them to be easily shared and verified by other users. RegCheck is designed to be adaptable across scientific domains, as well as registration and publication formats. In this paper we provide an overview of the motivation, workflow, and design principles of RegCheck, and we discuss its potential as an extensible infrastructure for reproducible science with an example use case.
Jamie Cummins, Beth Clarke, Ian Hussey +1
Jan 17, 2026cs.CL

Mapping the maturation of TCM as an adjuvant to radiotherapy

The integration of complementary medicine into oncology represents a paradigm shift that has seen to increasing adoption of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) as an adjuvant to radiotherapy. About twenty-five years since the formal institutionalization of integrated oncology, it is opportune to synthesize the trajectory of evidence for TCM as an adjuvant to radiotherapy. Here we conduct a large-scale analysis of 69,745 publications (2000 - 2025), emerging a cyclical evolution defined by coordinated expansion and contraction in publication output, international collaboration, and funding commitments that mirrors a define-ideate-test pattern. Using a theme modeling workflow designed to determine a stable thematic structure of the field, we identify five dominant thematic axes - cancer types, supportive care, clinical endpoints, mechanisms, and methodology - that signal a focus on patient well-being, scientific rigor and mechanistic exploration. Cross-theme integration of TCM is patient-centered and systems-oriented. Together with the emergent cycles of evolution, the thematic structure demonstrates progressive specialization and potential defragmentation of the field or saturation of existing research agenda. The analysis points to a field that has matured its current research agenda and is likely at the cusp of something new. Additionally, the field exhibits positive reporting of findings that is homogeneous across publication types, thematic areas, and the cycles of evolution suggesting a system-wide positive reporting bias agnostic to structural drivers.
P. Bilha Githinji, Aikaterini Melliou, Xi Yuan +8
Jan 15, 2026cs.DL

How Do We Engage with Other Disciplines? A Framework to Study Meaningful Interdisciplinary Discourse in Scholarly Publications

With the rising popularity of interdisciplinary work and increasing institutional incentives in this direction, there is a growing need to understand how resulting publications incorporate ideas from multiple disciplines. Existing computational approaches, such as affiliation diversity, keywords, and citation patterns, do not account for how individual citations are used to advance the citing work. Although, in line with addressing this gap, prior studies have proposed taxonomies to classify citation purpose, these frameworks are not well-suited to interdisciplinary research and do not provide quantitative measures of citation engagement quality. To address these limitations, we propose a framework for the evaluation of citation engagement in interdisciplinary Natural Language Processing (NLP) publications. Our approach introduces a citation purpose taxonomy tailored to interdisciplinary work, supported by an annotation study. We demonstrate the utility of this framework through a thorough analysis of publications at the intersection of NLP and Computational Social Science.
Bagyasree Sudharsan, Alexandria Leto, Maria Leonor Pacheco
Jan 15, 2026cs.AI

PaperScout: An Autonomous Agent for Academic Paper Search with Process-Aware Sequence-Level Policy Optimization

Academic paper search is a fundamental task in scientific research, yet most existing approaches organize retrieval around predefined workflows or structured interaction protocols that struggle with complex, conditional queries. To address this limitation, we propose PaperScout, an autonomous agent that reformulates paper search as a sequential decision-making process. Unlike static workflows, PaperScout dynamically decides whether, when, and how to invoke search and expand tools based on accumulated retrieval context. However, training such agents presents a fundamental challenge: standard reinforcement learning methods, typically designed for single-turn tasks, suffer from a granularity mismatch when applied to multi-turn agentic tasks, where token-level optimization diverges from the granularity of sequence-level interactions, leading to noisy credit assignment and unstable training dynamics. We introduce Proximal Sequence Policy Optimization (PSPO), a process-aware, sequence-level policy optimization method that aligns optimization with agent--environment interaction. Comprehensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world benchmarks demonstrate that PaperScout significantly outperforms strong structured retrieval and RL baselines in both recall and relevance, validating the effectiveness of our adaptive agentic framework and optimization strategy.
Tingyue Pan, Jie Ouyang, Mingyue Cheng +7
Dec 2, 2025cs.CV

PPTArena: A Benchmark for PowerPoint Editing

We introduce PPTArena, a benchmark for PowerPoint editing that evaluates how agents modify real slides from natural-language instructions. Unlike benchmarks that rely on image-PDF renderings or text-to-slide generation, PPTArena features 100 decks with over 1,300 human-curated edits across 2,125 slides, spanning text, charts, animations, and professional master styles. Each edit pairs a ground-truth deck with a target rubric and is scored by two Vision-Language Model (VLM) judges: one rates instruction following from structural diffs, the other visual quality from slide images. On top of this benchmark, we present PPTPilot, a structure-aware agent that plans semantic edit sequences, routes between programmatic tools and deterministic XML operations, and verifies each result in an iterative plan-edit-check loop. PPTPilot outperforms strong VLM-based agents by more than 10 percentage points on compound, layout-sensitive, and cross-slide edits, with large gains in visual fidelity and deck-wide consistency. Despite this, all agents still struggle on long-horizon, document-scale tasks, underscoring how hard reliable PowerPoint editing remains. We publicly release our code at https://github.com/michaelofengend/PPTArena .
Michael Ofengenden, Yunze Man, Ziqi Pang +2
Nov 10, 2025cs.CY

The Journal of Prompt-Engineered (Moral) Philosophy Or: Why AI-Assisted Ethics Research Requires Process Transparency

Existing AI disclosure mandates in scholarship require that AI assistance be reported but leave transparency philosophically unspecified: they fix the duty without explaining what the duty serves. We argue that ethical inquiry is essentially contested at two independent levels -- about what it is, and about what it demands of the inquirer -- defeating output-only evaluation and welfare-economic dismissal of the transparency question, and, by extension, reproducibility framings imported from the empirical sciences. The transparency duty is grounded instead in agent-integrity: the legibility, before a community of inquiry, of the identity-constituting commitments that the author's mode of philosophising expresses. Because the standards for evaluating such work are not communally settled, the achievable goal for transparency is not evaluation against agreed criteria but tracking -- accumulating the evidentiary record that lets each tradition assess the work on its own terms and makes future normative judgments possible. We develop a documentation-adequacy framework that operationalises Meaningful Human Control through five transparency elements -- declaration, navigation, documentation account, process documentation, and development records -- demonstrated by the paper itself, whose full documentation record is archived at a persistent identifier. The framework is a first iteration subject to revision, not a settled standard.
Michele Loi
Oct 22, 2025cs.SE

Human-Agent Collaborative Paper-to-Page Crafting

In the quest for scientific progress, communicating research is as vital as the discovery itself. Yet, researchers are often sidetracked by the manual, repetitive chore of building project webpages to make their dense papers accessible. While automation has tackled static slides and posters, the dynamic, interactive nature of webpages has remained an unaddressed challenge. To bridge this gap, we reframe the problem, arguing that the solution lies not in a single command, but in a collaborative, hierarchical process. We introduce AutoPage\textbf{AutoPage}, a novel multi-agent system that embodies this philosophy. AutoPage deconstructs paper-to-page creation into a coarse-to-fine pipeline from narrative planning to multimodal content generation and interactive rendering. To combat AI hallucination, dedicated "Checker" agents verify each step against the source paper, while optional human checkpoints ensure the final product aligns perfectly with the author's vision, transforming the system from a mere tool into a powerful collaborative assistant. To rigorously validate our approach, we also construct PageBench\textbf{PageBench}, the first benchmark for this new task. Experiments show AutoPage not only generates high-quality, visually appealing pages but does so with remarkable efficiency in under 15 minutes for less than $0.1. Code and dataset will be released at \href\href{https://mqleet.github.io/AutoPage_ProjectPage/}{Webpage}.
Qianli Ma, Siyu Wang, Yilin Chen +7
Jun 3, 2025cs.CY

Position: EU AI Act's Research Exemptions Can Break the Publication Norms of Major AI Conferences

The EU has become one of the vanguards in regulating the digital age. A particularly important regulation in the Artificial Intelligence (AI) domain is the 2024 enacted EU AI Act. The AI Act specifies -- due to a risk-based approach -- various obligations for providers of AI systems. These obligations, for example, include a cascade of documentation and compliance measures, which represent a potential obstacle to science. But do these obligations also apply to AI researchers? This position paper argues that, indeed, the AI Act's obligations could apply in many more cases than the AI community is aware of. Moreover, we argue that the AI Act is drafted in a manner that may unwillingly disrupt the scientific publication practices of the AI research community, with a focus on model and system release. We contribute the following: 1. We offer a high-level roadmap for AI researchers to evaluate whether they need to comply with the AI Act 2. We explain with everyday research examples why the AI Act applies to AI research. 3. We analyse the exceptions of the AI Act's applicability AI research and offer visual tool for researchers to navigate the AI Act's complex system or research exceptions 4. We establish a position the AI Act's research exceptions fail to account for current AI research conventions, as publishing AI research may void the research exceptions of the Act. 5. We propose changes to the AI Act to provide more legal certainty for AI researchers and give two recommendations for AI researchers to reduce the risk of not complying with the AI Act. We see our paper as a starting point for a discussion between policymakers, legal scholars, and AI researchers to avoid unintended side effects of the AI Act.
Alina Wernick, Kristof Meding
Apr 10, 2025cs.CL

Large language models reshape the language of science

Scientific language is a central infrastructure of knowledge production, but it remains unclear whether large language models (LLMs) are altering not only how scientists write, but also how scientific knowledge is communicated and accessed. Here we analyze 21.36 million scientific abstracts published between 2020 and 2024, together with historical records from major journals, to trace recent changes in the language of science. We identify a marked turning point in 2024, when scientific writing shows a sharp increase in lexical complexity alongside a decline in syntactic complexity. This shift is pervasive across disciplines and journal tiers, and is more pronounced in texts by scholars working in non-native English contexts, especially those from language backgrounds that differ more typologically from English. Controlled polishing experiments confirm that LLMs reproduce this pattern by favoring more lexically dense and syntactically compressed expression. We further show why this linguistic shift matters: it may widen the distance between scientific discourse and public-facing language, while also helping scholars in non-native English contexts navigate English-language publishing requirements. These findings suggest that LLMs may broaden participation in scientific authorship while narrowing the accessibility of scientific communication, making them a new force in the linguistic infrastructure of science.
Dingkang Lin, Naixuan Zhao, Dan Tian +1
Sep 17, 2024cs.CL

CORE-Bench: Fostering the Credibility of Published Research Through a Computational Reproducibility Agent Benchmark

AI agents have the potential to aid users on a variety of consequential tasks, including conducting scientific research. To spur the development of useful agents, we need benchmarks that are challenging, but more crucially, directly correspond to real-world tasks of interest. This paper introduces such a benchmark, designed to measure the accuracy of AI agents in tackling a crucial yet surprisingly challenging aspect of scientific research: computational reproducibility. This task, fundamental to the scientific process, involves reproducing the results of a study using the provided code and data. We introduce CORE-Bench (Computational Reproducibility Agent Benchmark), a benchmark consisting of 270 tasks based on 90 scientific papers across three disciplines (computer science, social science, and medicine). Tasks in CORE-Bench consist of three difficulty levels and include both language-only and vision-language tasks. We provide an evaluation system to measure the accuracy of agents in a fast and parallelizable way, saving days of evaluation time for each run compared to a sequential implementation. We evaluated two baseline agents: the general-purpose AutoGPT and a task-specific agent called CORE-Agent. We tested both variants using two underlying language models: GPT-4o and GPT-4o-mini. The best agent achieved an accuracy of 21% on the hardest task, showing the vast scope for improvement in automating routine scientific tasks. Having agents that can reproduce existing work is a necessary step towards building agents that can conduct novel research and could verify and improve the performance of other research agents. We hope that CORE-Bench can improve the state of reproducibility and spur the development of future research agents.
Zachary S. Siegel, Sayash Kapoor, Nitya Nadgir +2
Jul 2, 2024cs.CL

Generative Large Language Models in Automated Fact-Checking: A Survey

The rapid spread of false and misleading information on online platforms poses a growing societal challenge, overwhelming the capacity of manual fact-checking and increasing the demand for scalable, reliable automation. Recent advances in generative large language models (LLMs) have broadened the scope of automated fact-checking beyond accuracy-driven prediction. LLMs are now integral components of fact-checking pipelines, supporting tasks such as generating new data, performing and assisting with fact verification, and shaping how fact-checking systems are evaluated. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of the role of generative LLMs in automated fact-checking, based on a systematic review of 199 research papers. We introduce a unifying taxonomy that captures how generative LLMs are integrated into fact-checking workflows and analyze their use across core fact-checking tasks, dataset construction and augmentation strategies, task formulations, and evaluation practices. Additionally, we investigate the impact of generative LLMs in multilingual and low-resource settings in fact-checking, highlighting trends, limitations, and gaps in current research. By consolidating fragmented research efforts and identifying methodological patterns, limitations, and open challenges, this survey maps the current state of generative LLMs in automated fact-checking. It aims to support researchers in developing more reliable, interpretable, and inclusive fact-checking systems, while outlining promising directions for future research in this rapidly evolving field.
Ivan Vykopal, Matúš Pikuliak, Simon Ostermann +1
May 3, 2024cs.CL

Abstention vs. Hallucination: Benchmarking LLM Source Attribution for Scientific Citations

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly generate citation-backed responses, yet citation hallucination remains a major challenge for trustworthy scientific information access. We introduce REASONS, a benchmark of 12,723 sentence-level citation instances spanning 12 arXiv subject categories, designed to evaluate scientific citation attribution under varying evidence conditions. We propose a dual-metric framework consisting of Abstention Rate (AR) and Hallucination Rate (HR) to characterize the trade-off between reliability and responsiveness. Using author-attribution and title-attribution tasks, we evaluate proprietary and open-source LLMs under zero-context, metadata-augmented, cascaded metadata-augmented prompting (CMP), retrieval-augmented, and adversarial settings. Advanced RAG lowers HR relative to Naive RAG (65.4% vs. 87.6%) but reduces AR from 5.0% to 0%. Under adversarial metadata, several systems exceed 85% HR, while retrieval-augmented variants frequently maintain near-zero abstention. Human evaluation of 1,000 outputs (κ=0.78κ=0.78) finds a 12.7:1 ratio of factual hallucinations to acceptable paraphrases. Our findings demonstrate that citation attribution systems should be evaluated not only for correctness but also for their ability to abstain appropriately under uncertainty. REASONS provides a benchmark and evaluation framework for studying attribution reliability in citation generation.
Deepa Tilwani, Yash Saxena, Seyedali Mohammadi +5