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.
By Zhicheng Lin
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: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: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.
By Rodrigo Martins Boos
arXiv:2606. 09700v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM)-powered content moderation systems have become a critical defense against harmful online content.
By Qin Yang, Lu Malloy, Joshua Lee, Xiaohan Chang, Meisam Mohammady, Doowon Kim, Yuan Hong
arXiv:2609.24801v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in production systems, raising concerns about their exposure to adversarial manipulation throu...
By Fernando Outeda, Gustavo Betarte, Juan Diego Campo, Fiorella Cravero
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.
By Ming Li, Chenguang Wang, Xirui Li, Xinyue Zeng, Dianqi Li, Peng Shi, Dawei Zhou, Tianyi Zhou
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:2605. 03202v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models offer a tempting solution to address the peer review crisis.
By Joachim Baumann, Jiaxin Pei, Sanmi Koyejo, Dirk Hovy
arXiv:2606. 13757v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) reviewers are increasingly used in pull-request (PR) workflows, where their approvals help decide which code is merged into a repository.
By Rui Melo, Riccardo Fogliato, Sean Zhou, Pratiksha Thaker, Zhiwei Steven Wu
FMMD is a multimodal, multidisciplinary dataset of open peer reviews from F1000Research that pairs manuscript-level visual and structural data with version‑specific reviewer reports and editorial decisions. It addresses key gaps in existing datasets by preserving precise alignment between review comments and the exact manuscript version, and by including a wide range of scientific disciplines beyond computer science. The dataset supports tasks such as visual‑semantic consistency classification, figure‑related review comment generation, and editorial decision prediction, providing a comprehensive empirical resource for multimodal automated scholarly paper review research.
By Zhenzhen Zhuang, Yuqing Fu, Jing Zhu, Zhangping Zhou, Jialiang Lin
arXiv:2607. 10402v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have transformed misinformation from a primarily content-centric problem into a broader ecosystem-level security challenge.
By Lingwei Wei, Dou Hu, Wei Zhou, Songlin Hu, Philip S. Yu