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Abstract - Compound Deception in Elite Peer Review: A Failure Mode Taxonomy of 100 Fabricated Citations at NeurIPS 2025
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in academic writing workflows, yet they frequently hallucinate by generating citations to sources that do not exist. This study analyzes 100 AI-generated hallucinated citations that appeared in papers accepted by the 2025 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), one of the world's most prestigious AI conferences. Despite review by 3-5 expert researchers per paper, these fabricated citations evaded detection, appearing in 53 published papers (approx. 1% of all accepted papers). We develop a five-category taxonomy that classifies hallucinations by their failure mode: Total Fabrication (66%), Partial Attribute Corruption (27%), Identifier Hijacking (4%), Placeholder Hallucination (2%), and Semantic Hallucination (1%). Our analysis reveals a critical finding: every hallucination (100%) exhibited compound failure modes. The distribution of secondary characteristics was dominated by Semantic Hallucination (63%) and Identifier Hijacking (29%), which often appeared alongside Total Fabrication to create a veneer of plausibility and false verifiability. These compound structures exploit multiple verification heuristics simultaneously, explaining why peer review fails to detect them. The distribution exhibits a bimodal pattern: 92% of contaminated papers contain 1-2 hallucinations (minimal AI use) while 8% contain 4-13 hallucinations (heavy reliance). These findings demonstrate that current peer review processes do not include effective citation verification and that the problem extends beyond NeurIPS to other major conferences, government reports, and professional consulting. We propose mandatory automated citation verification at submission as an implementable solution to prevent fabricated citations from becoming normalized in scientific literature.
顶级同行评审中的复合欺骗:NeurIPS 2025会议100个伪造引用的失效模式分类 /
Compound Deception in Elite Peer Review: A Failure Mode Taxonomy of 100 Fabricated Citations at NeurIPS 2025
1️⃣ 一句话总结
这项研究分析了在顶级AI会议NeurIPS 2025中被接受的论文中出现的100个AI生成的虚假引用,发现所有虚假引用都采用了复合欺骗模式来绕过专家评审,揭示了当前同行评审流程在验证引用真实性方面存在严重漏洞。