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:2606. 10159v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI is increasingly used to support scientific peer review, from manuscript screening, reviewer assistance to editorial triage.
By Lin Li, Qi Zhang, Xander Davies, Jianing Qiu, Yarin Gal
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.
By Rounak Saha, Gurusha Juneja, Dayita Chaudhuri, Naveeja Sajeevan, Nihar B Shah, Danish Pruthi
arXiv:2507. 06185v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In July 2025, 18 academic manuscripts on arXiv contained hidden instructions that manipulated AI-assisted peer review (indirect prompt injection).
By Zhicheng Lin
arXiv:2608. 14630v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Human decision-making is often shaped by a range of well-documented cognitive biases.
By Zirui Cheng, Joey Chan, Simo Du, Chenhao Tan, Yue Guo, Hao Peng
arXiv:2607. 21498v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A rhetorical figure that Cicero and Quintilian catalogued two thousand years ago reappears, systematically, in the text of large language models: epanorthosis, the self-correction of the specimen {\guillemotleft}This is not a course.
By Federico Boggia
arXiv:2608. 01666v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: However, whether these judges truly evaluate the scientific substance of ideas or are influenced by superficial stylistic presentation remains an open question.
By Fengxian Ji, Yuke Li, Jingpu Yang, Juanfan Wu, Fan Zhang, Zhexuan Cui, Yu Xie, Min Peng, Qianqian Xie, Xiuying Chen, Zhuohan Xie
However, whether these judges truly evaluate the scientific substance of ideas or are influenced by superficial stylistic presentation remains an open question. To address this question, we propose SciStyleBench, a unified three-component benchmark for diagnosing and mitigating stylistic bias in LLM-based idea evaluation: (i) First, SciStyleStage, a three-stage evaluation environment that applies controlled stylistic perturbations to fixed scientific content across three settings no context, fixed-domain context, and open-domain retrieval context, covering 600 scientific ideas and 15 style variants, with 9,000 evaluation instances per setting; (ii) Second, SciStyleMetrics, a set of quantitative measures, including Style Bias Index (SBI), Substance Recognition Rate (SRR), and Adversarial Win Rate (AWR), to characterize how stylistic variation affects scoring stability, substance discrimination, and ranking robustness; (iii) Third, SciStyleExtractor, a plug-and-play evaluation module that separates presentation style from scientific content by predicting style type and deviation before style-conditioned evaluation, enabling us to assess whether style awareness reduces stylistic bias.
A rhetorical figure that Cicero and Quintilian catalogued two thousand years ago reappears, systematically, in the text of large language models: epanorthosis, the self-correction of the specimen «This is not a course. It is a journey of transformation».
arXiv:2606. 15887v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) systems are increasingly proposed to assist peer review, yet most evaluations judge the prose of machine-generated review text, not the validity of the numeric score a system assigns.
By Costa Georgantas
arXiv:2608. 03659v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to generate scientific reviews, yet existing evaluations rarely examine whether different providers align with both conference decisions and human reviewing priorities within the same controlled setting.
By Abraham Camelo-Guerrero, Jairo Diaz-Rodriguez
arXiv:2607. 14524v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This study presents WrAFT, a Writing Assessment and Feedback Tool, that delivers both accurate and reliable scores and effective comprehensive feedback to argumentative essays.
By Adnan Labib, Yixuan Huang, Jiahui Wu, John Maurice Gayed, Zheng Yuan, Qiao Wang