The article reports that in July 2025, 18 arXiv manuscripts contained hidden instructions designed to manipulate AI‑assisted peer review, such as covert commands to give only positive reviews. These prompts were concealed using white text and microscopic fonts, and the authors’ reactions ranged from withdrawal to defending the practice as a test of reviewer misuse of large language models. The study identifies four types of hidden prompts, critiques the ineffectiveness of honeypot defenses, and highlights inconsistent publisher policies while calling for controlled AI integration and harmonized guidelines in academic evaluation.
arXiv:2608. 14625v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Academic peer review is under mounting strain: NeurIPS 2025 received 21,575 submissions, ICLR 2025 received 11,603, and ICML 2025 received 12,107.
arXiv:2603. 20450v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A number of scientific conferences and journals have recently enacted policies that prohibit LLM usage by peer reviewers, except for polishing, paraphrasing, and grammar correction of otherwise human-written reviews.
arXiv:2606. 10159v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI is increasingly used to support scientific peer review, from manuscript screening, reviewer assistance to editorial triage.
arXiv:2605.05271v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: LLMs become increasingly capable, editorial boards and program committees are growing concerned about reviewers who fully outsource peer revi...
arXiv:2606. 01013v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Research is advancing faster than ever with artificial intelligence (AI); and so are the corresponding research papers.
arXiv:2605. 03202v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models offer a tempting solution to address the peer review crisis.
arXiv:2608. 08975v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As large language models increasingly participate in scientific evaluation, we investigate a potential form of reward hacking: how rhetorical choices shape AI-review judgments when reported scientific content is preserved and how these effects vary across evaluation conditions.
arXiv:2609.23264v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Peer-review evaluation is increasingly being automated with LLM-as-a-judge metrics, but this creates a measurement risk. A review may receive a high sc...
As large language models increasingly participate in scientific evaluation, we investigate a potential form of reward hacking: how rhetorical choices shape AI-review judgments when reported scientific content is preserved and how these effects vary across evaluation conditions. We construct a controlled corpus of 4,200 full-paper manuscripts derived from 120 anonymized ICLR 2026 submissions.
arXiv:2608. 03581v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI-assisted peer review is increasingly discussed and adopted as a tool to support the scientific publishing process, yet there is little systematic understanding of how publication venues regulate its use or of how capable current AI review systems are.
arXiv:2510. 18003v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The convergence of LLM-powered research assistants and AI-based peer review systems creates a critical vulnerability: fully automated publication loops where AI-generated research is evaluated by AI reviewers without human oversight.
AI-assisted peer review is increasingly discussed and adopted as a tool to support the scientific publishing process, yet there is little systematic understanding of how publication venues regulate its use or of how capable current AI review systems are. We address these questions by first surveying reviewer-facing AI policies across 111 leading AI/NLP conferences and medical journals, revealing substantial regulation differences between the two communities.