Daily Papers

Large language models have made significant progress in complex but easy-to-verify problems, yet they still struggle with discovering the unknown. In this paper, we present AlphaResearch, an autonomous research agent designed to discover new algorithms on open-ended problems. To synergize the feasibility and innovation of the discovery process, we construct a novel dual research environment by combining the execution-based verify and simulated real-world peer review environment. AlphaResearch discovers new algorithm by iteratively running the following steps: (1) propose new ideas (2) verify the ideas in the dual research environment (3) optimize the research proposals for better performance. To promote a transparent evaluation process, we construct AlphaResearchComp, a new evaluation benchmark that includes an eight open-ended algorithmic problems competition, with each problem carefully curated and verified through executable pipelines, objective metrics, and reproducibility checks. AlphaResearch gets a 2/8 win rate in head-to-head comparison with human researchers, demonstrate the possibility of accelerating algorithm discovery with LLMs. Notably, the algorithm discovered by AlphaResearch on the ``packing circles'' problem achieves the best-of-known performance, surpassing the results of human researchers and strong baselines from recent work (e.g., AlphaEvolve). Additionally, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of the remaining challenges of the 6/8 failure cases, providing valuable insights for future research.

The scholarly publishing ecosystem faces a dual crisis of unmanageable submission volumes and unregulated AI, creating an urgent need for new governance models to safeguard scientific integrity. The traditional human-only peer review regime lacks a scalable, objective benchmark, making editorial processes opaque and difficult to audit. Here we investigate a deterministic simulation framework that provides the first stable, evidence-based standard for evaluating AI-generated peer review reports. Analyzing 352 peer-review simulation reports, we identify consistent system state indicators that demonstrate its reliability. First, the system is able to simulate calibrated editorial judgment, with 'Revise' decisions consistently forming the majority outcome (>50%) across all disciplines, while 'Reject' rates dynamically adapt to field-specific norms, rising to 45% in Health Sciences. Second, it maintains unwavering procedural integrity, enforcing a stable 29% evidence-anchoring compliance rate that remains invariant across diverse review tasks and scientific domains. These findings demonstrate a system that is predictably rule-bound, mitigating the stochasticity of generative AI. For the scientific community, this provides a transparent tool to ensure fairness; for publishing strategists, it offers a scalable instrument for auditing workflows, managing integrity risks, and implementing evidence-based governance. The framework repositions AI as an essential component of institutional accountability, providing the critical infrastructure to maintain trust in scholarly communication.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated wide-ranging applications across various fields and have shown significant potential in the academic peer-review process. However, existing applications are primarily limited to static review generation based on submitted papers, which fail to capture the dynamic and iterative nature of real-world peer reviews. In this paper, we reformulate the peer-review process as a multi-turn, long-context dialogue, incorporating distinct roles for authors, reviewers, and decision makers. We construct a comprehensive dataset containing over 26,841 papers with 92,017 reviews collected from multiple sources, including the top-tier conference and prestigious journal. This dataset is meticulously designed to facilitate the applications of LLMs for multi-turn dialogues, effectively simulating the complete peer-review process. Furthermore, we propose a series of metrics to evaluate the performance of LLMs for each role under this reformulated peer-review setting, ensuring fair and comprehensive evaluations. We believe this work provides a promising perspective on enhancing the LLM-driven peer-review process by incorporating dynamic, role-based interactions. It aligns closely with the iterative and interactive nature of real-world academic peer review, offering a robust foundation for future research and development in this area. We open-source the dataset at https://github.com/chengtan9907/ReviewMT.

Peer review is fundamental to the integrity and advancement of scientific publication. Traditional methods of peer review analyses often rely on exploration and statistics of existing peer review data, which do not adequately address the multivariate nature of the process, account for the latent variables, and are further constrained by privacy concerns due to the sensitive nature of the data. We introduce AgentReview, the first large language model (LLM) based peer review simulation framework, which effectively disentangles the impacts of multiple latent factors and addresses the privacy issue. Our study reveals significant insights, including a notable 37.1% variation in paper decisions due to reviewers' biases, supported by sociological theories such as the social influence theory, altruism fatigue, and authority bias. We believe that this study could offer valuable insights to improve the design of peer review mechanisms.

Automated peer review has evolved from simple text classification to structured feedback generation. However, current state-of-the-art systems still struggle with "surface-level" critiques: they excel at summarizing content but often fail to accurately assess novelty and significance or identify deep methodological flaws because they evaluate papers in a vacuum, lacking the external context a human expert possesses. In this paper, we introduce ScholarPeer, a search-enabled multi-agent framework designed to emulate the cognitive processes of a senior researcher. ScholarPeer employs a dual-stream process of context acquisition and active verification. It dynamically constructs a domain narrative using a historian agent, identifies missing comparisons via a baseline scout, and verifies claims through a multi-aspect Q&A engine, grounding the critique in live web-scale literature. We evaluate ScholarPeer on DeepReview-13K and the results demonstrate that ScholarPeer achieves significant win-rates against state-of-the-art approaches in side-by-side evaluations and reduces the gap to human-level diversity.

Peer review is essential for scientific progress but faces growing challenges due to increasing submission volumes and reviewer fatigue. Existing automated review approaches struggle with factual accuracy, rating consistency, and analytical depth, often generating superficial or generic feedback lacking the insights characteristic of high-quality human reviews. We introduce ReviewRL, a reinforcement learning framework for generating comprehensive and factually grounded scientific paper reviews. Our approach combines: (1) an ArXiv-MCP retrieval-augmented context generation pipeline that incorporates relevant scientific literature, (2) supervised fine-tuning that establishes foundational reviewing capabilities, and (3) a reinforcement learning procedure with a composite reward function that jointly enhances review quality and rating accuracy. Experiments on ICLR 2025 papers demonstrate that ReviewRL significantly outperforms existing methods across both rule-based metrics and model-based quality assessments. ReviewRL establishes a foundational framework for RL-driven automatic critique generation in scientific discovery, demonstrating promising potential for future development in this domain. The implementation of ReviewRL will be released at GitHub.

Providing constructive feedback to paper authors is a core component of peer review. With reviewers increasingly having less time to perform reviews, automated support systems are required to ensure high reviewing quality, thus making the feedback in reviews useful for authors. To this end, we identify four key aspects of review comments (individual points in weakness sections of reviews) that drive the utility for authors: Actionability, Grounding & Specificity, Verifiability, and Helpfulness. To enable evaluation and development of models assessing review comments, we introduce the RevUtil dataset. We collect 1,430 human-labeled review comments and scale our data with 10k synthetically labeled comments for training purposes. The synthetic data additionally contains rationales, i.e., explanations for the aspect score of a review comment. Employing the RevUtil dataset, we benchmark fine-tuned models for assessing review comments on these aspects and generating rationales. Our experiments demonstrate that these fine-tuned models achieve agreement levels with humans comparable to, and in some cases exceeding, those of powerful closed models like GPT-4o. Our analysis further reveals that machine-generated reviews generally underperform human reviews on our four aspects.

Peer reviewing is a central component in the scientific publishing process. We present the first public dataset of scientific peer reviews available for research purposes (PeerRead v1) providing an opportunity to study this important artifact. The dataset consists of 14.7K paper drafts and the corresponding accept/reject decisions in top-tier venues including ACL, NIPS and ICLR. The dataset also includes 10.7K textual peer reviews written by experts for a subset of the papers. We describe the data collection process and report interesting observed phenomena in the peer reviews. We also propose two novel NLP tasks based on this dataset and provide simple baseline models. In the first task, we show that simple models can predict whether a paper is accepted with up to 21% error reduction compared to the majority baseline. In the second task, we predict the numerical scores of review aspects and show that simple models can outperform the mean baseline for aspects with high variance such as 'originality' and 'impact'.

Peer review in machine learning is under growing pressure from rising submission volume and limited reviewer time. Most LLM-based reviewing systems read only the manuscript and generate comments from the paper's own narrative. This makes their outputs sensitive to presentation quality and leaves them weak when the evidence needed for review lies in related work or released code. We present FactReview, an evidence-grounded reviewing system that combines claim extraction, literature positioning, and execution-based claim verification. Given a submission, FactReview identifies major claims and reported results, retrieves nearby work to clarify the paper's technical position, and, when code is available, executes the released repository under bounded budgets to test central empirical claims. It then produces a concise review and an evidence report that assigns each major claim one of five labels: Supported, Supported by the paper, Partially supported, In conflict, or Inconclusive. In a case study on CompGCN, FactReview reproduces results that closely match those reported for link prediction and node classification, yet also shows that the paper's broader performance claim across tasks is not fully sustained: on MUTAG graph classification, the reproduced result is 88.4%, whereas the strongest baseline reported in the paper remains 92.6%. The claim is therefore only partially supported. More broadly, this case suggests that AI is most useful in peer review not as a final decision-maker, but as a tool for gathering evidence and helping reviewers produce more evidence-grounded assessments. The code is public at https://github.com/DEFENSE-SEU/Review-Assistant.

The rapid growth of AI conferences is straining an already fragile peer-review system, leading to heavy reviewer workloads, expertise mismatches, inconsistent evaluation standards, superficial or templated reviews, and limited accountability under compressed timelines. In response, conference organizers have introduced new policies and interventions to preserve review standards. Yet these ad-hoc changes often create further concerns and confusion about the review process, leaving how papers are ultimately accepted - and how practices evolve across years - largely opaque. We present Paper Copilot, a system that creates durable digital archives of peer reviews across a wide range of computer-science venues, an open dataset that enables researchers to study peer review at scale, and a large-scale empirical analysis of ICLR reviews spanning multiple years. By releasing both the infrastructure and the dataset, Paper Copilot supports reproducible research on the evolution of peer review. We hope these resources help the community track changes, diagnose failure modes, and inform evidence-based improvements toward a more robust, transparent, and reliable peer-review system.

Peer review is the cornerstone of scientific publishing, yet it suffers from inconsistencies, reviewer subjectivity, and scalability challenges. We introduce ReviewerToo, a modular framework for studying and deploying AI-assisted peer review to complement human judgment with systematic and consistent assessments. ReviewerToo supports systematic experiments with specialized reviewer personas and structured evaluation criteria, and can be partially or fully integrated into real conference workflows. We validate ReviewerToo on a carefully curated dataset of 1,963 paper submissions from ICLR 2025, where our experiments with the gpt-oss-120b model achieves 81.8% accuracy for the task of categorizing a paper as accept/reject compared to 83.9% for the average human reviewer. Additionally, ReviewerToo-generated reviews are rated as higher quality than the human average by an LLM judge, though still trailing the strongest expert contributions. Our analysis highlights domains where AI reviewers excel (e.g., fact-checking, literature coverage) and where they struggle (e.g., assessing methodological novelty and theoretical contributions), underscoring the continued need for human expertise. Based on these findings, we propose guidelines for integrating AI into peer-review pipelines, showing how AI can enhance consistency, coverage, and fairness while leaving complex evaluative judgments to domain experts. Our work provides a foundation for systematic, hybrid peer-review systems that scale with the growth of scientific publishing.

Large Language Models are versatile general-task solvers, and their capabilities can truly assist people with scholarly peer review as pre-review agents, if not as fully autonomous peer-review agents. While incredibly beneficial, automating academic peer-review, as a concept, raises concerns surrounding safety, research integrity, and the validity of the academic peer-review process. The majority of the studies performing a systematic evaluation of frontier LLMs generating reviews across science disciplines miss the mark on addressing the alignment/misalignment of reviews along with the utility of LLM generated reviews when compared against publication outcomes such as Citations, Hit-papers, Novelty, and Disruption. This paper presents an experimental study in which we gathered ground-truth reviewer ratings from OpenReview and used various frontier open-weight LLMs to generate reviews of papers to gauge the safety and reliability of incorporating LLMs into the scientific review pipeline. Our findings demonstrate the utility of frontier open-weight LLMs as pre-review screening agents despite highlighting fundamental misalignment risks when deployed as autonomous reviewers. Our results show that all models exhibit weak correlation with human peer reviewers (0.15), with systematic overestimation bias of 3-5 points and uniformly high confidence scores (8.0-9.0/10) despite prediction errors. However, we also observed that LLM reviews correlate more strongly with post-publication metrics than with human scores, suggesting potential utility as pre-review screening tools. Our findings highlight the potential and address the pitfalls of automating peer reviews with language models. We open-sourced our dataset D_{LMRSD} to help the research community expand the safety framework of automating scientific reviews.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential in scientific domains, yet a fundamental question remains unanswered: Can we simulate human research communities with LLMs? Addressing this question can deepen our understanding of the processes behind idea brainstorming and inspire the automatic discovery of novel scientific insights. In this work, we propose ResearchTown, a multi-agent framework for research community simulation. Within this framework, the human research community is simplified and modeled as an agent-data graph, where researchers and papers are represented as agent-type and data-type nodes, respectively, and connected based on their collaboration relationships. We also introduce TextGNN, a text-based inference framework that models various research activities (e.g., paper reading, paper writing, and review writing) as special forms of a unified message-passing process on the agent-data graph. To evaluate the quality of the research simulation, we present ResearchBench, a benchmark that uses a node-masking prediction task for scalable and objective assessment based on similarity. Our experiments reveal three key findings: (1) ResearchTown can provide a realistic simulation of collaborative research activities, including paper writing and review writing; (2) ResearchTown can maintain robust simulation with multiple researchers and diverse papers; (3) ResearchTown can generate interdisciplinary research ideas that potentially inspire novel research directions.

Peer review serves as a backbone of academic research, but in most AI conferences, the review quality is degrading as the number of submissions explodes. To reliably detect low-quality reviews, we define misinformed review points as either "weaknesses" in a review that contain incorrect premises, or "questions" in a review that can be already answered by the paper. We verify that 15.2% of weaknesses and 26.4% of questions are misinformed and introduce ReviewScore indicating if a review point is misinformed. To evaluate the factuality of each premise of weaknesses, we propose an automated engine that reconstructs every explicit and implicit premise from a weakness. We build a human expert-annotated ReviewScore dataset to check the ability of LLMs to automate ReviewScore evaluation. Then, we measure human-model agreements on ReviewScore using eight current state-of-the-art LLMs and verify moderate agreements. We also prove that evaluating premise-level factuality shows significantly higher agreements than evaluating weakness-level factuality. A thorough disagreement analysis further supports a potential of fully automated ReviewScore evaluation.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in general natural language processing tasks but often fall short in complex reasoning tasks. Recent studies have explored human-like problem-solving strategies, such as self-correct, to push further the boundary of single-model reasoning ability. In this work, we let a single model "step outside the box" by engaging multiple models to correct each other. We introduce a multi-agent collaboration strategy that emulates the academic peer review process. Each agent independently constructs its own solution, provides reviews on the solutions of others, and assigns confidence levels to its reviews. Upon receiving peer reviews, agents revise their initial solutions. Extensive experiments on three different types of reasoning tasks show that our collaboration approach delivers superior accuracy across all ten datasets compared to existing methods. Further study underscores the effectiveness of integrating confidence in reviews, demonstrates the superiority of feedback exchange over mere solution sharing, and highlights the role of capability and diversity in fostering successful collaboration.

Evaluating novelty is critical yet challenging in peer review, as reviewers must assess submissions against a vast, rapidly evolving literature. This report presents OpenNovelty, an LLM-powered agentic system for transparent, evidence-based novelty analysis. The system operates through four phases: (1) extracting the core task and contribution claims to generate retrieval queries; (2) retrieving relevant prior work based on extracted queries via semantic search engine; (3) constructing a hierarchical taxonomy of core-task-related work and performing contribution-level full-text comparisons against each contribution; and (4) synthesizing all analyses into a structured novelty report with explicit citations and evidence snippets. Unlike naive LLM-based approaches, OpenNovelty grounds all assessments in retrieved real papers, ensuring verifiable judgments. We deploy our system on 500+ ICLR 2026 submissions with all reports publicly available on our website, and preliminary analysis suggests it can identify relevant prior work, including closely related papers that authors may overlook. OpenNovelty aims to empower the research community with a scalable tool that promotes fair, consistent, and evidence-backed peer review.

Large language models are increasingly being used to assess and forecast research ideas, yet we lack scalable ways to evaluate the quality of models' judgments about these scientific ideas. Towards this goal, we introduce PoT, a semi-verifiable benchmarking framework that links scientific idea judgments to downstream signals that become observable later (e.g., citations and shifts in researchers' agendas). PoT freezes a pre-cutoff snapshot of evidence in an offline sandbox and asks models to forecast post-cutoff outcomes, enabling verifiable evaluation when ground truth arrives, scalable benchmarking without exhaustive expert annotation, and analysis of human-model misalignment against signals such as peer-review awards. In addition, PoT provides a controlled testbed for agent-based research judgments that evaluate scientific ideas, comparing tool-using agents to non-agent baselines under prompt ablations and budget scaling. Across 30,000+ instances spanning four benchmark domains, we find that, compared with non-agent baselines, higher interaction budgets generally improve agent performance, while the benefit of tool use is strongly task-dependent. By combining time-partitioned, future-verifiable targets with an offline sandbox for tool use, PoT supports scalable evaluation of agents on future-facing scientific idea judgment tasks.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used across the scientific workflow, including to draft peer-review reports. However, many AI-generated reviews are superficial and insufficiently actionable, leaving authors without concrete, implementable guidance and motivating the gap this work addresses. We propose RbtAct, which targets actionable review feedback generation and places existing peer review rebuttal at the center of learning. Rebuttals show which reviewer comments led to concrete revisions or specific plans, and which were only defended. Building on this insight, we leverage rebuttal as implicit supervision to directly optimize a feedback generator for actionability. To support this objective, we propose a new task called perspective-conditioned segment-level review feedback generation, in which the model is required to produce a single focused comment based on the complete paper and a specified perspective such as experiments and writing. We also build a large dataset named RMR-75K that maps review segments to the rebuttal segments that address them, with perspective labels and impact categories that order author uptake. We then train the Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct model with supervised fine-tuning on review segments followed by preference optimization using rebuttal derived pairs. Experiments with human experts and LLM-as-a-judge show consistent gains in actionability and specificity over strong baselines while maintaining grounding and relevance.

Peer review is a cornerstone of scientific publishing, including at premier machine learning conferences such as ICLR. As submission volumes increase, understanding the nature and dynamics of the review process is crucial for improving its efficiency, effectiveness, and the quality of published papers. We present a large-scale analysis of the ICLR 2024 and 2025 peer review processes, focusing on before- and after-rebuttal scores and reviewer-author interactions. We examine review scores, author-reviewer engagement, temporal patterns in review submissions, and co-reviewer influence effects. Combining quantitative analyses with LLM-based categorization of review texts and rebuttal discussions, we identify common strengths and weaknesses for each rating group, as well as trends in rebuttal strategies that are most strongly associated with score changes. Our findings show that initial scores and the ratings of co-reviewers are the strongest predictors of score changes during the rebuttal, pointing to a degree of reviewer influence. Rebuttals play a valuable role in improving outcomes for borderline papers, where thoughtful author responses can meaningfully shift reviewer perspectives. More broadly, our study offers evidence-based insights to improve the peer review process, guiding authors on effective rebuttal strategies and helping the community design fairer and more efficient review processes. Our code and score changes data are available at https://github.com/papercopilot/iclr-insights.

Revising scientific papers based on peer feedback is a challenging task that requires not only deep scientific knowledge and reasoning, but also the ability to recognize the implicit requests in high-level feedback and to choose the best of many possible ways to update the manuscript in response. We introduce this task for large language models and release ARIES, a dataset of review comments and their corresponding paper edits, to enable training and evaluating models. We study two versions of the task: comment-edit alignment and edit generation, and evaluate several baselines, including GPT-4. We find that models struggle even to identify the edits that correspond to a comment, especially in cases where the comment is phrased in an indirect way or where the edit addresses the spirit of a comment but not the precise request. When tasked with generating edits, GPT-4 often succeeds in addressing comments on a surface level, but it rigidly follows the wording of the feedback rather than the underlying intent, and includes fewer technical details than human-written edits. We hope that our formalization, dataset, and analysis will form a foundation for future work in this area.

Peer review serves as the gatekeeper of science, yet the surge in submissions and widespread adoption of large language models (LLMs) in scholarly evaluation present unprecedented challenges. Recent work has focused on using LLMs to improve review efficiency or generate insightful review content. However, unchecked deficient reviews from both human experts and AI systems threaten to systematically undermine the peer review ecosystem and compromise academic integrity. To address this critical issue, we introduce ReviewGuard, an automated system for detecting and categorizing deficient reviews. ReviewGuard employs a comprehensive four-stage LLM-driven framework that: (1) collects ICLR and NeurIPS papers with their corresponding reviews from OpenReview; (2) annotates review types using GPT-4.1 with human validation; (3) addresses class imbalance and data scarcity through LLM-driven synthetic data augmentation, producing a final corpus of 6,634 papers, 24,657 real reviews, and 46,438 synthetic reviews; and (4) fine-tunes both encoder-based models and open source LLMs. We perform comprehensive feature analysis of the structure and quality of the review text. Compared to sufficient reviews, deficient reviews demonstrate lower rating scores, higher self-reported confidence, reduced structural complexity, and a higher proportion of negative sentiment. AI-generated text detection reveals that, since ChatGPT's emergence, AI-generated reviews have increased dramatically. In the evaluation of deficient review detection models, mixed training with synthetic and real review data provides substantial enhancements to recall and F1 scores on the binary task. This study presents the first LLM-driven system for detecting deficient peer reviews, providing evidence to inform AI governance in peer review while offering valuable insights into human-AI collaboration to maintain academic integrity.

The surge in scientific submissions has placed increasing strain on the traditional peer-review process, prompting the exploration of large language models (LLMs) for automated review generation. While LLMs demonstrate competence in producing structured and coherent feedback, their capacity for critical reasoning, contextual grounding, and quality sensitivity remains limited. To systematically evaluate these aspects, we propose a comprehensive evaluation framework that integrates semantic similarity analysis and structured knowledge graph metrics to assess LLM-generated reviews against human-written counterparts. We construct a large-scale benchmark of 1,683 papers and 6,495 expert reviews from ICLR and NeurIPS in multiple years, and generate reviews using five LLMs. Our findings show that LLMs perform well in descriptive and affirmational content, capturing the main contributions and methodologies of the original work, with GPT-4o highlighted as an illustrative example, generating 15.74% more entities than human reviewers in the strengths section of good papers in ICLR 2025. However, they consistently underperform in identifying weaknesses, raising substantive questions, and adjusting feedback based on paper quality. GPT-4o produces 59.42% fewer entities than real reviewers in the weaknesses and increases node count by only 5.7% from good to weak papers, compared to 50% in human reviews. Similar trends are observed across all conferences, years, and models, providing empirical foundations for understanding the merits and defects of LLM-generated reviews and informing the development of future LLM-assisted reviewing tools. Data, code, and more detailed results are publicly available at https://github.com/RichardLRC/Peer-Review.

Peer reviewing is a central process in modern research and essential for ensuring high quality and reliability of published work. At the same time, it is a time-consuming process and increasing interest in emerging fields often results in a high review workload, especially for senior researchers in this area. How to cope with this problem is an open question and it is vividly discussed across all major conferences. In this work, we propose an Argument Mining based approach for the assistance of editors, meta-reviewers, and reviewers. We demonstrate that the decision process in the field of scientific publications is driven by arguments and automatic argument identification is helpful in various use-cases. One of our findings is that arguments used in the peer-review process differ from arguments in other domains making the transfer of pre-trained models difficult. Therefore, we provide the community with a new peer-review dataset from different computer science conferences with annotated arguments. In our extensive empirical evaluation, we show that Argument Mining can be used to efficiently extract the most relevant parts from reviews, which are paramount for the publication decision. The process remains interpretable since the extracted arguments can be highlighted in a review without detaching them from their context.

Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle with creative generation, and multi-agent frameworks that improve reasoning through interaction can paradoxically hinder creativity by inducing content homogenization. We introduce LLM Review, a peer-review-inspired framework implementing Blind Peer Review: agents exchange targeted feedback while revising independently, preserving divergent creative trajectories. To enable rigorous evaluation, we propose SciFi-100, a science fiction writing dataset with a unified framework combining LLM-as-a-judge scoring, human annotation, and rule-based novelty metrics. Experiments demonstrate that LLM Review consistently outperforms multi-agent baselines, and smaller models with our framework can surpass larger single-agent models, suggesting interaction structure may substitute for model scale.

The automation of scientific discovery has been a long-standing goal within the research community, driven by the potential to accelerate knowledge creation. While significant progress has been made using commercial large language models (LLMs) as research assistants or idea generators, the possibility of automating the entire research process with open-source LLMs remains largely unexplored. This paper explores the feasibility of using open-source post-trained LLMs as autonomous agents capable of performing the full cycle of automated research and review, from literature review and manuscript preparation to peer review and paper revision. Our iterative preference training framework consists of CycleResearcher, which conducts research tasks, and CycleReviewer, which simulates the peer review process, providing iterative feedback via reinforcement learning. To train these models, we develop two new datasets, Review-5k and Research-14k, reflecting real-world machine learning research and peer review dynamics. Our results demonstrate that CycleReviewer achieves a 26.89\% improvement in mean absolute error (MAE) over individual human reviewers in predicting paper scores, indicating that LLMs can surpass expert-level performance in research evaluation. In research, the papers generated by the CycleResearcher model achieved a score of 5.36 in simulated peer reviews, surpassing the preprint level of 5.24 from human experts and approaching the accepted paper level of 5.69. This work represents a significant step toward fully automated scientific inquiry, providing ethical safeguards and advancing AI-driven research capabilities. The code, dataset and model weight are released at http://github/minjun-zhu/Researcher.

Peer review is a critical component of scientific progress in the fields like AI, but the rapid increase in submission volume has strained the reviewing system, which inevitably leads to reviewer shortages and declines review quality. Besides the growing research popularity, another key factor in this overload is the repeated resubmission of substandard manuscripts, largely due to the lack of effective tools for authors to self-evaluate their work before submission. Large Language Models (LLMs) show great promise in assisting both authors and reviewers, and their performance is fundamentally limited by the quality of the peer review data. However, existing peer review datasets face three major limitations: (1) limited data diversity, (2) inconsistent and low-quality data due to the use of revised rather than initial submissions, and (3) insufficient support for tasks involving rebuttal and reviewer-author interactions. To address these challenges, we introduce the largest consistency-ensured peer review and rebuttal dataset named Re^2, which comprises 19,926 initial submissions, 70,668 review comments, and 53,818 rebuttals from 24 conferences and 21 workshops on OpenReview. Moreover, the rebuttal and discussion stage is framed as a multi-turn conversation paradigm to support both traditional static review tasks and dynamic interactive LLM assistants, providing more practical guidance for authors to refine their manuscripts and helping alleviate the growing review burden. Our data and code are available in https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ReviewBench_anon/.

In spite of recent advancements in text-to-image generation, limitations persist in handling complex and imaginative prompts due to the restricted diversity and complexity of training data. This work explores how diffusion models can generate images from prompts requiring artistic creativity or specialized knowledge. We introduce the Realistic-Fantasy Benchmark (RFBench), a novel evaluation framework blending realistic and fantastical scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose the Realistic-Fantasy Network (RFNet), a training-free approach integrating diffusion models with LLMs. Extensive human evaluations and GPT-based compositional assessments demonstrate our approach's superiority over state-of-the-art methods. Our code and dataset is available at https://leo81005.github.io/Reality-and-Fantasy/.

We introduce REAL, a benchmark and framework for multi-turn agent evaluations on deterministic simulations of real-world websites. REAL comprises high-fidelity, deterministic replicas of 11 widely-used websites across domains such as e-commerce, travel, communication, and professional networking. We also release a benchmark consisting of 112 practical tasks that mirror everyday complex user interactions requiring both accurate information retrieval and state-changing actions. All interactions occur within this fully controlled setting, eliminating safety risks and enabling robust, reproducible evaluation of agent capability and reliability. Our novel evaluation framework combines programmatic checks of website state for action-based tasks with rubric-guided LLM-based judgments for information retrieval. The framework supports both open-source and proprietary agent systems through a flexible evaluation harness that accommodates black-box commands within browser environments, allowing research labs to test agentic systems without modification. Our empirical results show that frontier language models achieve at most a 41% success rate on REAL, highlighting critical gaps in autonomous web navigation and task completion capabilities. Our framework supports easy integration of new tasks, reproducible evaluation, and scalable post-training data generation, marking a significant step forward in evaluating and advancing agent capabilities.

Peer review relies on substantive, evidence-based questions, yet current LLMs generate surface-level queries that perform worse than human reviewer questions in expert evaluation. To address this gap, we curate a high-quality dataset of reviewer questions from OpenReview and conduct a human preference study where expert annotators evaluate question-paper pairs across three dimensions: effort, evidence, and grounding. From these annotations, we train IntelliReward, a reward model built from a frozen autoregressive LLM with trainable multi-head transformers. Validated against expert judgments, IntelliReward predicts reviewer-question quality better than API-based SFT baselines and provides scalable evaluation. We apply Decoupled Clip and Dynamic Sampling Policy Optimization (DAPO) with IntelliReward to train IntelliAsk, a question-generation model aligned with human standards of effortful, evidence-based critique. Human evaluations show IntelliAsk generates more grounded, substantive and effortful questions than strong baselines and reduces reliance on first-page content. We also find improvements on reasoning and writing benchmarks, suggesting reviewer-question quality correlates with broader capabilities. Compared to Qwen3-32B, IntelliAsk improves MuSR (68.3 vs 64.7 Acc) and WritingBench (8.31 vs 8.07). We release our code, filtered review dataset, expert annotations, IntelliAsk and IntelliReward to support automatic evaluation of grounding, effort, and evidence in LLM-generated review questions.

Peer review is a critical process for ensuring the integrity of published scientific research. Confidence in this process is predicated on the assumption that experts in the relevant domain give careful consideration to the merits of manuscripts which are submitted for publication. With the recent rapid advancements in large language models (LLMs), a new risk to the peer review process is that negligent reviewers will rely on LLMs to perform the often time consuming process of reviewing a paper. However, there is a lack of existing resources for benchmarking the detectability of AI text in the domain of peer review. To address this deficiency, we introduce a comprehensive dataset containing a total of 788,984 AI-written peer reviews paired with corresponding human reviews, covering 8 years of papers submitted to each of two leading AI research conferences (ICLR and NeurIPS). We use this new resource to evaluate the ability of 18 existing AI text detection algorithms to distinguish between peer reviews fully written by humans and different state-of-the-art LLMs. Additionally, we explore a context-aware detection method called Anchor, which leverages manuscript content to detect AI-generated reviews, and analyze the sensitivity of detection models to LLM-assisted editing of human-written text. Our work reveals the difficulty of identifying AI-generated text at the individual peer review level, highlighting the urgent need for new tools and methods to detect this unethical use of generative AI. Our dataset is publicly available at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/IntelLabs/AI-Peer-Review-Detection-Benchmark.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled social simulation through multi-agent systems. Prior efforts focus on agent societies created from scratch, assigning agents with newly defined personas. However, simulating established fictional worlds and characters remain largely underexplored, despite its significant practical value. In this paper, we introduce BookWorld, a comprehensive system for constructing and simulating book-based multi-agent societies. BookWorld's design covers comprehensive real-world intricacies, including diverse and dynamic characters, fictional worldviews, geographical constraints and changes, e.t.c. BookWorld enables diverse applications including story generation, interactive games and social simulation, offering novel ways to extend and explore beloved fictional works. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that BookWorld generates creative, high-quality stories while maintaining fidelity to the source books, surpassing previous methods with a win rate of 75.36%. The code of this paper can be found at the project page: https://bookworld2025.github.io/.

Ensuring the long-term sustainability of recommender systems (RS) emerges as a crucial issue. Traditional offline evaluation methods for RS typically focus on immediate user feedback, such as clicks, but they often neglect the long-term impact of content creators. On real-world content platforms, creators can strategically produce and upload new items based on user feedback and preference trends. While previous studies have attempted to model creator behavior, they often overlook the role of information asymmetry. This asymmetry arises because creators primarily have access to feedback on the items they produce, while platforms possess data on the entire spectrum of user feedback. Current RS simulators, however, fail to account for this asymmetry, leading to inaccurate long-term evaluations. To address this gap, we propose CreAgent, a Large Language Model (LLM)-empowered creator simulation agent. By incorporating game theory's belief mechanism and the fast-and-slow thinking framework, CreAgent effectively simulates creator behavior under conditions of information asymmetry. Additionally, we enhance CreAgent's simulation ability by fine-tuning it using Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO). Our credibility validation experiments show that CreAgent aligns well with the behaviors between real-world platform and creator, thus improving the reliability of long-term RS evaluations. Moreover, through the simulation of RS involving CreAgents, we can explore how fairness- and diversity-aware RS algorithms contribute to better long-term performance for various stakeholders. CreAgent and the simulation platform are publicly available at https://github.com/shawnye2000/CreAgent.

As NLP evaluation shifts from static benchmarks to multi-turn interactive settings, LLM-based simulators have become widely used as user proxies, serving two roles: generating user turns and providing evaluation signals. Yet, these simulations are frequently assumed to be faithful to real human behaviors, often without rigorous verification. We formalize the Sim2Real gap in user simulation and present the first study running the full τ-bench protocol with real humans (451 participants, 165 tasks), benchmarking 31 LLM simulators across proprietary, open-source, and specialized families using the User-Sim Index (USI), a metric we introduce to quantify how well LLM simulators resemble real user interactive behaviors and feedback. Behaviorally, LLM simulators are excessively cooperative, stylistically uniform, and lack realistic frustration or ambiguity, creating an "easy mode" that inflates agent success rates above the human baseline. In evaluations, real humans provide nuanced judgments across eight quality dimensions while simulated users produce uniformly more positive feedback; rule-based rewards are failing to capture rich feedback signals generated by human users. Overall, higher general model capability does not necessarily yield more faithful user simulation. These findings highlight the importance of human validation when using LLM-based user simulators in the agent development cycle and motivate improved models for user simulation.

Peer review is a cornerstone of quality control in scientific publishing. With the increasing workload, the unintended use of `quick' heuristics, referred to as lazy thinking, has emerged as a recurring issue compromising review quality. Automated methods to detect such heuristics can help improve the peer-reviewing process. However, there is limited NLP research on this issue, and no real-world dataset exists to support the development of detection tools. This work introduces LazyReview, a dataset of peer-review sentences annotated with fine-grained lazy thinking categories. Our analysis reveals that Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle to detect these instances in a zero-shot setting. However, instruction-based fine-tuning on our dataset significantly boosts performance by 10-20 performance points, highlighting the importance of high-quality training data. Furthermore, a controlled experiment demonstrates that reviews revised with lazy thinking feedback are more comprehensive and actionable than those written without such feedback. We will release our dataset and the enhanced guidelines that can be used to train junior reviewers in the community. (Code available here: https://github.com/UKPLab/arxiv2025-lazy-review)

Critical peer review of scientific manuscripts presents a significant challenge for Large Language Models (LLMs), partly due to data limitations and the complexity of expert reasoning. This report introduces Persistent Workflow Prompting (PWP), a potentially broadly applicable prompt engineering methodology designed to bridge this gap using standard LLM chat interfaces (zero-code, no APIs). We present a proof-of-concept PWP prompt for the critical analysis of experimental chemistry manuscripts, featuring a hierarchical, modular architecture (structured via Markdown) that defines detailed analysis workflows. We develop this PWP prompt through iterative application of meta-prompting techniques and meta-reasoning aimed at systematically codifying expert review workflows, including tacit knowledge. Submitted once at the start of a session, this PWP prompt equips the LLM with persistent workflows triggered by subsequent queries, guiding modern reasoning LLMs through systematic, multimodal evaluations. Demonstrations show the PWP-guided LLM identifying major methodological flaws in a test case while mitigating LLM input bias and performing complex tasks, including distinguishing claims from evidence, integrating text/photo/figure analysis to infer parameters, executing quantitative feasibility checks, comparing estimates against claims, and assessing a priori plausibility. To ensure transparency and facilitate replication, we provide full prompts, detailed demonstration analyses, and logs of interactive chats as supplementary resources. Beyond the specific application, this work offers insights into the meta-development process itself, highlighting the potential of PWP, informed by detailed workflow formalization, to enable sophisticated analysis using readily available LLMs for complex scientific tasks.

Social network simulation plays a crucial role in addressing various challenges within social science. It offers extensive applications such as state prediction, phenomena explanation, and policy-making support, among others. In this work, we harness the formidable human-like capabilities exhibited by large language models (LLMs) in sensing, reasoning, and behaving, and utilize these qualities to construct the S^3 system (short for Social network Simulation System). Adhering to the widely employed agent-based simulation paradigm, we employ prompt engineering and prompt tuning techniques to ensure that the agent's behavior closely emulates that of a genuine human within the social network. Specifically, we simulate three pivotal aspects: emotion, attitude, and interaction behaviors. By endowing the agent in the system with the ability to perceive the informational environment and emulate human actions, we observe the emergence of population-level phenomena, including the propagation of information, attitudes, and emotions. We conduct an evaluation encompassing two levels of simulation, employing real-world social network data. Encouragingly, the results demonstrate promising accuracy. This work represents an initial step in the realm of social network simulation empowered by LLM-based agents. We anticipate that our endeavors will serve as a source of inspiration for the development of simulation systems within, but not limited to, social science.

The rapid evolution of Large Language Models has catalyzed a surge in scientific idea production, yet this leap has not been accompanied by a matching advance in idea evaluation. The fundamental nature of scientific evaluation needs knowledgeable grounding, collective deliberation, and multi-criteria decision-making. However, existing idea evaluation methods often suffer from narrow knowledge horizons, flattened evaluation dimensions, and the inherent bias in LLM-as-a-Judge. To address these, we regard idea evaluation as a knowledge-grounded, multi-perspective reasoning problem and introduce InnoEval, a deep innovation evaluation framework designed to emulate human-level idea assessment. We apply a heterogeneous deep knowledge search engine that retrieves and grounds dynamic evidence from diverse online sources. We further achieve review consensus with an innovation review board containing reviewers with distinct academic backgrounds, enabling a multi-dimensional decoupled evaluation across multiple metrics. We construct comprehensive datasets derived from authoritative peer-reviewed submissions to benchmark InnoEval. Experiments demonstrate that InnoEval can consistently outperform baselines in point-wise, pair-wise, and group-wise evaluation tasks, exhibiting judgment patterns and consensus highly aligned with human experts.

We present OpenReviewer, an open-source system for generating high-quality peer reviews of machine learning and AI conference papers. At its core is Llama-OpenReviewer-8B, an 8B parameter language model specifically fine-tuned on 79,000 expert reviews from top conferences. Given a PDF paper submission and review template as input, OpenReviewer extracts the full text, including technical content like equations and tables, and generates a structured review following conference-specific guidelines. Our evaluation on 400 test papers shows that OpenReviewer produces considerably more critical and realistic reviews compared to general-purpose LLMs like GPT-4 and Claude-3.5. While other LLMs tend toward overly positive assessments, OpenReviewer's recommendations closely match the distribution of human reviewer ratings. The system provides authors with rapid, constructive feedback to improve their manuscripts before submission, though it is not intended to replace human peer review. OpenReviewer is available as an online demo and open-source tool.

This paper calls on the research community not only to investigate how human biases are inherited by large language models (LLMs) but also to explore how these biases in LLMs can be leveraged to make society's "unwritten code" - such as implicit stereotypes and heuristics - visible and accessible for critique. We introduce a conceptual framework through a case study in science: uncovering hidden rules in peer review - the factors that reviewers care about but rarely state explicitly due to normative scientific expectations. The idea of the framework is to push LLMs to speak out their heuristics through generating self-consistent hypotheses - why one paper appeared stronger in reviewer scoring - among paired papers submitted to 45 computer science conferences, while iteratively searching deeper hypotheses from remaining pairs where existing hypotheses cannot explain. We observed that LLMs' normative priors about the internal characteristics of good science extracted from their self-talk, e.g. theoretical rigor, were systematically updated toward posteriors that emphasize storytelling about external connections, such as how the work is positioned and connected within and across literatures. This shift reveals the primacy of scientific myths about intrinsic properties driving scientific excellence rather than extrinsic contextualization and storytelling that influence conceptions of relevance and significance. Human reviewers tend to explicitly reward aspects that moderately align with LLMs' normative priors (correlation = 0.49) but avoid articulating contextualization and storytelling posteriors in their review comments (correlation = -0.14), despite giving implicit reward to them with positive scores. We discuss the broad applicability of the framework, leveraging LLMs as diagnostic tools to surface the tacit codes underlying human society, enabling more precisely targeted responsible AI.

The ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to mimic human behavior triggered a plethora of computational social science research, assuming that empirical studies of humans can be conducted with AI agents instead. Since there have been conflicting research findings on whether and when this hypothesis holds, there is a need to better understand the differences in their experimental designs. We focus on replicating the behavior of social network users with the use of LLMs for the analysis of communication on social networks. First, we provide a formal framework for the simulation of social networks, before focusing on the sub-task of imitating user communication. We empirically test different approaches to imitate user behavior on X in English and German. Our findings suggest that social simulations should be validated by their empirical realism measured in the setting in which the simulation components were fitted. With this paper, we argue for more rigor when applying generative-agent-based modeling for social simulation.

In the digital era, the rapid propagation of fake news and rumors via social networks brings notable societal challenges and impacts public opinion regulation. Traditional fake news modeling typically forecasts the general popularity trends of different groups or numerically represents opinions shift. However, these methods often oversimplify real-world complexities and overlook the rich semantic information of news text. The advent of large language models (LLMs) provides the possibility of modeling subtle dynamics of opinion. Consequently, in this work, we introduce a Fake news Propagation Simulation framework (FPS) based on LLM, which studies the trends and control of fake news propagation in detail. Specifically, each agent in the simulation represents an individual with a distinct personality. They are equipped with both short-term and long-term memory, as well as a reflective mechanism to mimic human-like thinking. Every day, they engage in random opinion exchanges, reflect on their thinking, and update their opinions. Our simulation results uncover patterns in fake news propagation related to topic relevance, and individual traits, aligning with real-world observations. Additionally, we evaluate various intervention strategies and demonstrate that early and appropriately frequent interventions strike a balance between governance cost and effectiveness, offering valuable insights for practical applications. Our study underscores the significant utility and potential of LLMs in combating fake news.

AI is increasingly playing a pivotal role in transforming how scientific discoveries are made. We introduce The AI Scientist-v2, an end-to-end agentic system capable of producing the first entirely AI generated peer-review-accepted workshop paper. This system iteratively formulates scientific hypotheses, designs and executes experiments, analyzes and visualizes data, and autonomously authors scientific manuscripts. Compared to its predecessor (v1, Lu et al., 2024 arXiv:2408.06292), The AI Scientist-v2 eliminates the reliance on human-authored code templates, generalizes effectively across diverse machine learning domains, and leverages a novel progressive agentic tree-search methodology managed by a dedicated experiment manager agent. Additionally, we enhance the AI reviewer component by integrating a Vision-Language Model (VLM) feedback loop for iterative refinement of content and aesthetics of the figures. We evaluated The AI Scientist-v2 by submitting three fully autonomous manuscripts to a peer-reviewed ICLR workshop. Notably, one manuscript achieved high enough scores to exceed the average human acceptance threshold, marking the first instance of a fully AI-generated paper successfully navigating a peer review. This accomplishment highlights the growing capability of AI in conducting all aspects of scientific research. We anticipate that further advancements in autonomous scientific discovery technologies will profoundly impact human knowledge generation, enabling unprecedented scalability in research productivity and significantly accelerating scientific breakthroughs, greatly benefiting society at large. We have open-sourced the code at https://github.com/SakanaAI/AI-Scientist-v2 to foster the future development of this transformative technology. We also discuss the role of AI in science, including AI safety.

Generating a review for an academic research paper is a complex task that requires a deep understanding of the document's content and the interdependencies between its sections. It demands not only insight into technical details but also an appreciation of the paper's overall coherence and structure. Recent methods have predominantly focused on fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) to address this challenge. However, they often overlook the computational and performance limitations imposed by long input token lengths. To address this, we introduce AutoRev, an Automatic Peer Review System for Academic Research Papers. Our novel framework represents an academic document as a graph, enabling the extraction of the most critical passages that contribute significantly to the review. This graph-based approach demonstrates effectiveness for review generation and is potentially adaptable to various downstream tasks, such as question answering, summarization, and document representation. When applied to review generation, our method outperforms SOTA baselines by an average of 58.72% across all evaluation metrics. We hope that our work will stimulate further research in applying graph-based extraction techniques to other downstream tasks in NLP. We plan to make our code public upon acceptance.

The growing integration of large language models (LLMs) into the peer review process presents potential risks to the fairness and reliability of scholarly evaluation. While LLMs offer valuable assistance for reviewers with language refinement, there is growing concern over their use to generate substantive review content. Existing general AI-generated text detectors are vulnerable to paraphrasing attacks and struggle to distinguish between surface language refinement and substantial content generation, suggesting that they primarily rely on stylistic cues. When applied to peer review, this limitation can result in unfairly suspecting reviews with permissible AI-assisted language enhancement, while failing to catch deceptively humanized AI-generated reviews. To address this, we propose a paradigm shift from style-based to content-based detection. Specifically, we introduce CoCoNUTS, a content-oriented benchmark built upon a fine-grained dataset of AI-generated peer reviews, covering six distinct modes of human-AI collaboration. Furthermore, we develop CoCoDet, an AI review detector via a multi-task learning framework, designed to achieve more accurate and robust detection of AI involvement in review content. Our work offers a practical foundation for evaluating the use of LLMs in peer review, and contributes to the development of more precise, equitable, and reliable detection methods for real-world scholarly applications. Our code and data will be publicly available at https://github.com/Y1hanChen/COCONUTS.

Peer assessment has been widely applied across diverse academic fields over the last few decades and has demonstrated its effectiveness. However, the advantages of peer assessment can only be achieved with high-quality peer reviews. Previous studies have found that high-quality review comments usually comprise several features (e.g., contain suggestions, mention problems, use a positive tone). Thus, researchers have attempted to evaluate peer-review comments by detecting different features using various machine learning and deep learning models. However, there is no single study that investigates using a multi-task learning (MTL) model to detect multiple features simultaneously. This paper presents two MTL models for evaluating peer-review comments by leveraging the state-of-the-art pre-trained language representation models BERT and DistilBERT. Our results demonstrate that BERT-based models significantly outperform previous GloVe-based methods by around 6% in F1-score on tasks of detecting a single feature, and MTL further improves performance while reducing model size.

This paper introduces a simulator designed for opinion dynamics researchers to model competing influences within social networks in the presence of LLM-based agents. By integrating established opinion dynamics principles with state-of-the-art LLMs, this tool enables the study of influence propagation and counter-misinformation strategies. The simulator is particularly valuable for researchers in social science, psychology, and operations research, allowing them to analyse societal phenomena without requiring extensive coding expertise. Additionally, the simulator will be openly available on GitHub, ensuring accessibility and adaptability for those who wish to extend its capabilities for their own research.

Recent developments in LLMs offer new opportunities for assisting authors in improving their work. In this paper, we envision a use case where authors can receive LLM-generated reviews that uncover weak points in the current draft. While initial methods for automated review generation already exist, these methods tend to produce reviews that lack detail, and they do not cover the range of opinions that human reviewers produce. To address this shortcoming, we propose an efficient two-stage review generation framework called Reviewer2. Unlike prior work, this approach explicitly models the distribution of possible aspects that the review may address. We show that this leads to more detailed reviews that better cover the range of aspects that human reviewers identify in the draft. As part of the research, we generate a large-scale review dataset of 27k papers and 99k reviews that we annotate with aspect prompts, which we make available as a resource for future research.

A significant challenge for robot learning research is our ability to accurately measure and compare the performance of robot policies. Benchmarking in robotics is historically challenging due to the stochasticity, reproducibility, and time-consuming nature of real-world rollouts. This challenge is exacerbated for recent generalist policies, which has to be evaluated across a wide variety of scenes and tasks. Evaluation in simulation offers a scalable complement to real world evaluations, but the visual and physical domain gap between existing simulation benchmarks and the real world has made them an unreliable signal for policy improvement. Furthermore, building realistic and diverse simulated environments has traditionally required significant human effort and expertise. To bridge the gap, we introduce Policy Evaluation and Environment Reconstruction in Simulation (PolaRiS), a scalable real-to-sim framework for high-fidelity simulated robot evaluation. PolaRiS utilizes neural reconstruction methods to turn short video scans of real-world scenes into interactive simulation environments. Additionally, we develop a simple simulation data co-training recipe that bridges remaining real-to-sim gaps and enables zero-shot evaluation in unseen simulation environments. Through extensive paired evaluations between simulation and the real world, we demonstrate that PolaRiS evaluations provide a much stronger correlation to real world generalist policy performance than existing simulated benchmarks. Its simplicity also enables rapid creation of diverse simulated environments. As such, this work takes a step towards distributed and democratized evaluation for the next generation of robotic foundation models.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly utilized in scientific research assessment, particularly in automated paper review. However, existing LLM-based review systems face significant challenges, including limited domain expertise, hallucinated reasoning, and a lack of structured evaluation. To address these limitations, we introduce DeepReview, a multi-stage framework designed to emulate expert reviewers by incorporating structured analysis, literature retrieval, and evidence-based argumentation. Using DeepReview-13K, a curated dataset with structured annotations, we train DeepReviewer-14B, which outperforms CycleReviewer-70B with fewer tokens. In its best mode, DeepReviewer-14B achieves win rates of 88.21\% and 80.20\% against GPT-o1 and DeepSeek-R1 in evaluations. Our work sets a new benchmark for LLM-based paper review, with all resources publicly available. The code, model, dataset and demo have be released in http://ai-researcher.net.

We propose the PeerRank method for peer assessment. This constructs a grade for an agent based on the grades proposed by the agents evaluating the agent. Since the grade of an agent is a measure of their ability to grade correctly, the PeerRank method weights grades by the grades of the grading agent. The PeerRank method also provides an incentive for agents to grade correctly. As the grades of an agent depend on the grades of the grading agents, and as these grades themselves depend on the grades of other agents, we define the PeerRank method by a fixed point equation similar to the PageRank method for ranking web-pages. We identify some formal properties of the PeerRank method (for example, it satisfies axioms of unanimity, no dummy, no discrimination and symmetry), discuss some examples, compare with related work and evaluate the performance on some synthetic data. Our results show considerable promise, reducing the error in grade predictions by a factor of 2 or more in many cases over the natural baseline of averaging peer grades.

The impressive performance of large language models (LLMs) has attracted considerable attention from the academic and industrial communities. Besides how to construct and train LLMs, how to effectively evaluate and compare the capacity of LLMs has also been well recognized as an important yet difficult problem. Existing paradigms rely on either human annotators or model-based evaluators to evaluate the performance of LLMs on different tasks. However, these paradigms often suffer from high cost, low generalizability, and inherited biases in practice, which make them incapable of supporting the sustainable development of LLMs in long term. In order to address these issues, inspired by the peer review systems widely used in academic publication process, we propose a novel framework that can automatically evaluate LLMs through a peer-review process. Specifically, for the evaluation of a specific task, we first construct a small qualification exam to select "reviewers" from a couple of powerful LLMs. Then, to actually evaluate the "submissions" written by different candidate LLMs, i.e., the evaluatees, we use the reviewer LLMs to rate or compare the submissions. The final ranking of evaluatee LLMs is generated based on the results provided by all reviewers. We conducted extensive experiments on text summarization tasks with eleven LLMs including GPT-4. The results demonstrate the existence of biasness when evaluating using a single LLM. Also, our PRE model outperforms all the baselines, illustrating the effectiveness of the peer review mechanism.

As intelligent agents become more generally-capable, i.e. able to master a wide variety of tasks, the complexity and cost of properly evaluating them rises significantly. Tasks that assess specific capabilities of the agents can be correlated and stochastic, requiring many samples for accurate comparisons, leading to added costs. In this paper, we propose a formal definition and a conceptual framework for active evaluation of agents across multiple tasks, which assesses the performance of ranking algorithms as a function of number of evaluation data samples. Rather than curating, filtering, or compressing existing data sets as a preprocessing step, we propose an online framing: on every iteration, the ranking algorithm chooses the task and agents to sample scores from. Then, evaluation algorithms report a ranking of agents on each iteration and their performance is assessed with respect to the ground truth ranking over time. Several baselines are compared under different experimental contexts, with synthetic generated data and simulated online access to real evaluation data from Atari game-playing agents. We find that the classical Elo rating system -- while it suffers from well-known failure modes, in theory -- is a consistently reliable choice for efficient reduction of ranking error in practice. A recently-proposed method, Soft Condorcet Optimization, shows comparable performance to Elo on synthetic data and significantly outperforms Elo on real Atari agent evaluation. When task variation from the ground truth is high, selecting tasks based on proportional representation leads to higher rate of ranking error reduction.

The field of robotics has made significant advances towards generalist robot manipulation policies. However, real-world evaluation of such policies is not scalable and faces reproducibility challenges, which are likely to worsen as policies broaden the spectrum of tasks they can perform. We identify control and visual disparities between real and simulated environments as key challenges for reliable simulated evaluation and propose approaches for mitigating these gaps without needing to craft full-fidelity digital twins of real-world environments. We then employ these approaches to create SIMPLER, a collection of simulated environments for manipulation policy evaluation on common real robot setups. Through paired sim-and-real evaluations of manipulation policies, we demonstrate strong correlation between policy performance in SIMPLER environments and in the real world. Additionally, we find that SIMPLER evaluations accurately reflect real-world policy behavior modes such as sensitivity to various distribution shifts. We open-source all SIMPLER environments along with our workflow for creating new environments at https://simpler-env.github.io to facilitate research on general-purpose manipulation policies and simulated evaluation frameworks.

Writing effective rebuttals is a high-stakes task that demands more than linguistic fluency, as it requires precise alignment between reviewer intent and manuscript details. Current solutions typically treat this as a direct-to-text generation problem, suffering from hallucination, overlooked critiques, and a lack of verifiable grounding. To address these limitations, we introduce RebuttalAgent, the first multi-agents framework that reframes rebuttal generation as an evidence-centric planning task. Our system decomposes complex feedback into atomic concerns and dynamically constructs hybrid contexts by synthesizing compressed summaries with high-fidelity text while integrating an autonomous and on-demand external search module to resolve concerns requiring outside literature. By generating an inspectable response plan before drafting, RebuttalAgent ensures that every argument is explicitly anchored in internal or external evidence. We validate our approach on the proposed RebuttalBench and demonstrate that our pipeline outperforms strong baselines in coverage, faithfulness, and strategic coherence, offering a transparent and controllable assistant for the peer review process. Code will be released.

Scientific discoveries must be communicated clearly to realize their full potential. Without effective communication, even the most groundbreaking findings risk being overlooked or misunderstood. The primary way scientists communicate their work and receive feedback from the community is through peer review. However, the current system often provides inconsistent feedback between reviewers, ultimately hindering the improvement of a manuscript and limiting its potential impact. In this paper, we introduce a novel method APRES powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) to update a scientific papers text based on an evaluation rubric. Our automated method discovers a rubric that is highly predictive of future citation counts, and integrate it with APRES in an automated system that revises papers to enhance their quality and impact. Crucially, this objective should be met without altering the core scientific content. We demonstrate the success of APRES, which improves future citation prediction by 19.6% in mean averaged error over the next best baseline, and show that our paper revision process yields papers that are preferred over the originals by human expert evaluators 79% of the time. Our findings provide strong empirical support for using LLMs as a tool to help authors stress-test their manuscripts before submission. Ultimately, our work seeks to augment, not replace, the essential role of human expert reviewers, for it should be humans who discern which discoveries truly matter, guiding science toward advancing knowledge and enriching lives.

Consumer research costs companies billions annually yet suffers from panel biases and limited scale. Large language models (LLMs) offer an alternative by simulating synthetic consumers, but produce unrealistic response distributions when asked directly for numerical ratings. We present semantic similarity rating (SSR), a method that elicits textual responses from LLMs and maps these to Likert distributions using embedding similarity to reference statements. Testing on an extensive dataset comprising 57 personal care product surveys conducted by a leading corporation in that market (9,300 human responses), SSR achieves 90% of human test-retest reliability while maintaining realistic response distributions (KS similarity > 0.85). Additionally, these synthetic respondents provide rich qualitative feedback explaining their ratings. This framework enables scalable consumer research simulations while preserving traditional survey metrics and interpretability.

Peer review, as a cornerstone of scientific research, ensures the integrity and quality of scholarly work by providing authors with objective feedback for refinement. However, in the traditional peer review process, authors often receive vague or insufficiently detailed feedback, which provides limited assistance and leads to a more time-consuming review cycle. If authors can identify some specific weaknesses in their paper, they can not only address the reviewer's concerns but also improve their work. This raises the critical question of how to enhance authors' comprehension of review comments. In this paper, we present SEAGraph, a novel framework developed to clarify review comments by uncovering the underlying intentions behind them. We construct two types of graphs for each paper: the semantic mind graph, which captures the author's thought process, and the hierarchical background graph, which delineates the research domains related to the paper. A retrieval method is then designed to extract relevant content from both graphs, facilitating coherent explanations for the review comments. Extensive experiments show that SEAGraph excels in review comment understanding tasks, offering significant benefits to authors.

Integrating web search tools has significantly extended the capability of LLMs to address open-world, real-time, and long-tail problems. However, evaluating these Search Agents presents formidable challenges. First, constructing high-quality deep search benchmarks is prohibitively expensive, while unverified synthetic data often suffers from unreliable sources. Second, static benchmarks face dynamic obsolescence: as internet information evolves, complex queries requiring deep research often degrade into simple retrieval tasks due to increased popularity, and ground truths become outdated due to temporal shifts. Third, attribution ambiguity confounds evaluation, as an agent's performance is often dominated by its parametric memory rather than its actual search and reasoning capabilities. Finally, reliance on specific commercial search engines introduces variability that hampers reproducibility. To address these issues, we propose a novel framework, Mind-ParaWorld, for evaluating Search Agents in a Parallel World. Specifically, MPW samples real-world entity names to synthesize future scenarios and questions situated beyond the model's knowledge cutoff. A ParaWorld Law Model then constructs a set of indivisible Atomic Facts and a unique ground-truth for each question. During evaluation, instead of retrieving real-world results, the agent interacts with a ParaWorld Engine Model that dynamically generates SERPs grounded in these inviolable Atomic Facts. We release MPW-Bench, an interactive benchmark spanning 19 domains with 1,608 instances. Experiments across three evaluation settings show that, while search agents are strong at evidence synthesis given complete information, their performance is limited not only by evidence collection and coverage in unfamiliar search environments, but also by unreliable evidence sufficiency judgment and when-to-stop decisions-bottlenecks.

We present a novel, open-source social network simulation framework, MOSAIC, where generative language agents predict user behaviors such as liking, sharing, and flagging content. This simulation combines LLM agents with a directed social graph to analyze emergent deception behaviors and gain a better understanding of how users determine the veracity of online social content. By constructing user representations from diverse fine-grained personas, our system enables multi-agent simulations that model content dissemination and engagement dynamics at scale. Within this framework, we evaluate three different content moderation strategies with simulated misinformation dissemination, and we find that they not only mitigate the spread of non-factual content but also increase user engagement. In addition, we analyze the trajectories of popular content in our simulations, and explore whether simulation agents' articulated reasoning for their social interactions truly aligns with their collective engagement patterns. We open-source our simulation software to encourage further research within AI and social sciences.

Peer review is fundamental to scientific research, but the growing volume of publications has intensified the challenges of this expertise-intensive process. While LLMs show promise in various scientific tasks, their potential to assist with peer review, particularly in identifying paper limitations, remains understudied. We first present a comprehensive taxonomy of limitation types in scientific research, with a focus on AI. Guided by this taxonomy, for studying limitations, we present LimitGen, the first comprehensive benchmark for evaluating LLMs' capability to support early-stage feedback and complement human peer review. Our benchmark consists of two subsets: LimitGen-Syn, a synthetic dataset carefully created through controlled perturbations of high-quality papers, and LimitGen-Human, a collection of real human-written limitations. To improve the ability of LLM systems to identify limitations, we augment them with literature retrieval, which is essential for grounding identifying limitations in prior scientific findings. Our approach enhances the capabilities of LLM systems to generate limitations in research papers, enabling them to provide more concrete and constructive feedback.

Expert feedback lays the foundation of rigorous research. However, the rapid growth of scholarly production and intricate knowledge specialization challenge the conventional scientific feedback mechanisms. High-quality peer reviews are increasingly difficult to obtain. Researchers who are more junior or from under-resourced settings have especially hard times getting timely feedback. With the breakthrough of large language models (LLM) such as GPT-4, there is growing interest in using LLMs to generate scientific feedback on research manuscripts. However, the utility of LLM-generated feedback has not been systematically studied. To address this gap, we created an automated pipeline using GPT-4 to provide comments on the full PDFs of scientific papers. We evaluated the quality of GPT-4's feedback through two large-scale studies. We first quantitatively compared GPT-4's generated feedback with human peer reviewer feedback in 15 Nature family journals (3,096 papers in total) and the ICLR machine learning conference (1,709 papers). The overlap in the points raised by GPT-4 and by human reviewers (average overlap 30.85% for Nature journals, 39.23% for ICLR) is comparable to the overlap between two human reviewers (average overlap 28.58% for Nature journals, 35.25% for ICLR). The overlap between GPT-4 and human reviewers is larger for the weaker papers. We then conducted a prospective user study with 308 researchers from 110 US institutions in the field of AI and computational biology to understand how researchers perceive feedback generated by our GPT-4 system on their own papers. Overall, more than half (57.4%) of the users found GPT-4 generated feedback helpful/very helpful and 82.4% found it more beneficial than feedback from at least some human reviewers. While our findings show that LLM-generated feedback can help researchers, we also identify several limitations.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as simulated participants in social science experiments, but their behavior is often unstable and highly sensitive to design choices. Prior evaluations frequently conflate base-model capabilities with experimental instantiation, obscuring whether outcomes reflect the model itself or the agent setup. We instead frame participant simulation as an agent-design problem over full experimental protocols, where an agent is defined by a base model and a specification (e.g., participant attributes) that encodes behavioral assumptions. We introduce HUMANSTUDY-BENCH, a benchmark and execution engine that orchestrates LLM-based agents to reconstruct published human-subject experiments via a Filter--Extract--Execute--Evaluate pipeline, replaying trial sequences and running the original analysis pipeline in a shared runtime that preserves the original statistical procedures end to end. To evaluate fidelity at the level of scientific inference, we propose new metrics to quantify how much human and agent behaviors agree. We instantiate 12 foundational studies as an initial suite in this dynamic benchmark, spanning individual cognition, strategic interaction, and social psychology, and covering more than 6,000 trials with human samples ranging from tens to over 2,100 participants.

Social simulation is transforming traditional social science research by modeling human behavior through interactions between virtual individuals and their environments. With recent advances in large language models (LLMs), this approach has shown growing potential in capturing individual differences and predicting group behaviors. However, existing methods face alignment challenges related to the environment, target users, interaction mechanisms, and behavioral patterns. To this end, we introduce SocioVerse, an LLM-agent-driven world model for social simulation. Our framework features four powerful alignment components and a user pool of 10 million real individuals. To validate its effectiveness, we conducted large-scale simulation experiments across three distinct domains: politics, news, and economics. Results demonstrate that SocioVerse can reflect large-scale population dynamics while ensuring diversity, credibility, and representativeness through standardized procedures and minimal manual adjustments.

Scientific research relies on accurate citation for attribution and integrity, yet large language models (LLMs) introduce a new risk: fabricated references that appear plausible but correspond to no real publications. Such hallucinated citations have already been observed in submissions and accepted papers at major machine learning venues, exposing vulnerabilities in peer review. Meanwhile, rapidly growing reference lists make manual verification impractical, and existing automated tools remain fragile to noisy and heterogeneous citation formats and lack standardized evaluation. We present the first comprehensive benchmark and detection framework for hallucinated citations in scientific writing. Our multi-agent verification pipeline decomposes citation checking into claim extraction, evidence retrieval, passage matching, reasoning, and calibrated judgment to assess whether a cited source truly supports its claim. We construct a large-scale human-validated dataset across domains and define unified metrics for citation faithfulness and evidence alignment. Experiments with state-of-the-art LLMs reveal substantial citation errors and show that our framework significantly outperforms prior methods in both accuracy and interpretability. This work provides the first scalable infrastructure for auditing citations in the LLM era and practical tools to improve the trustworthiness of scientific references.

The rapid growth of submissions to top-tier Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) conferences has prompted many venues to transition from closed to open review platforms. Some have fully embraced open peer reviews, allowing public visibility throughout the process, while others adopt hybrid approaches, such as releasing reviews only after final decisions or keeping reviews private despite using open peer review systems. In this work, we analyze the strengths and limitations of these models, highlighting the growing community interest in transparent peer review. To support this discussion, we examine insights from Paper Copilot, a website launched two years ago to aggregate and analyze AI / ML conference data while engaging a global audience. The site has attracted over 200,000 early-career researchers, particularly those aged 18-34 from 177 countries, many of whom are actively engaged in the peer review process. Drawing on our findings, this position paper advocates for a more transparent, open, and well-regulated peer review aiming to foster greater community involvement and propel advancements in the field.

Accurately modeling opinion change through social interactions is crucial for addressing issues like misinformation and polarization. While role-playing large language models (LLMs) offer a promising way to simulate human-like interactions, existing research shows that single-agent alignment does not guarantee authentic multi-agent group dynamics. Current LLM role-play setups often produce unnatural dynamics (e.g., premature convergence), without an empirical benchmark to measure authentic human opinion trajectories. To bridge this gap, we introduce DEBATE, the first large-scale empirical benchmark explicitly designed to evaluate the authenticity of the interaction between multi-agent role-playing LLMs. DEBATE contains 29,417 messages from multi-round debate conversations among over 2,792 U.S.-based participants discussing 107 controversial topics, capturing both publicly-expressed messages and privately-reported opinions. Using DEBATE, we systematically evaluate and identify critical discrepancies between simulated and authentic group dynamics. We further demonstrate DEBATE's utility for aligning LLMs with human behavior through supervised fine-tuning, achieving improvements in surface-level metrics (e.g., ROUGE-L and message length) while highlighting limitations in deeper semantic alignment (e.g., semantic similarity). Our findings highlight both the potential and current limitations of role-playing LLM agents for realistically simulating human-like social dynamics.

With the growing spread of misinformation online, research has increasingly focused on detecting and tracking fake news. However, an overlooked issue is that fake news does not naturally exist in social networks -- it often originates from distorted facts or deliberate fabrication by malicious actors. Understanding how true news gradually evolves into fake news is critical for early detection and prevention, reducing its spread and impact. Hence, in this paper, we take the first step toward simulating and revealing this evolution, proposing a Fake News evolUtion Simulation framEwork (FUSE) based on large language models (LLMs). Specifically, we employ LLM as agents to represent individuals in a simulated social network. We define four types of agents commonly observed in daily interactions: spreaders, who propagate information; commentators, who provide opinions and interpretations; verifiers, who check the accuracy of information; and bystanders, who passively observe without engaging. For simulated environments, we model various social network structures, such as high-clustering networks and scale-free networks, to mirror real-world network dynamics. Each day, the agents engage in belief exchanges, reflect on their thought processes, and reintroduce the news accordingly. Given the lack of prior work in this area, we developed a FUSE-EVAL evaluation framework to measure the deviation from true news during the fake news evolution process. The results show that FUSE successfully captures the underlying patterns of how true news transforms into fake news and accurately reproduces previously discovered instances of fake news, aligning closely with human evaluations. Moreover, our work provides insights into the fact that combating fake news should not be delayed until it has fully evolved; instead, prevention in advance is key to achieving better outcomes.

Scientific Research, vital for improving human life, is hindered by its inherent complexity, slow pace, and the need for specialized experts. To enhance its productivity, we propose a ResearchAgent, a large language model-powered research idea writing agent, which automatically generates problems, methods, and experiment designs while iteratively refining them based on scientific literature. Specifically, starting with a core paper as the primary focus to generate ideas, our ResearchAgent is augmented not only with relevant publications through connecting information over an academic graph but also entities retrieved from an entity-centric knowledge store based on their underlying concepts, mined and shared across numerous papers. In addition, mirroring the human approach to iteratively improving ideas with peer discussions, we leverage multiple ReviewingAgents that provide reviews and feedback iteratively. Further, they are instantiated with human preference-aligned large language models whose criteria for evaluation are derived from actual human judgments. We experimentally validate our ResearchAgent on scientific publications across multiple disciplines, showcasing its effectiveness in generating novel, clear, and valid research ideas based on human and model-based evaluation results.

With the continuous advancement of image generation technology, advanced models such as GPT-Image-1 and Qwen-Image have achieved remarkable text-to-image consistency and world knowledge However, these models still fall short in photorealistic image generation. Even on simple T2I tasks, they tend to produce " fake" images with distinct AI artifacts, often characterized by "overly smooth skin" and "oily facial sheens". To recapture the original goal of "indistinguishable-from-reality" generation, we propose RealGen, a photorealistic text-to-image framework. RealGen integrates an LLM component for prompt optimization and a diffusion model for realistic image generation. Inspired by adversarial generation, RealGen introduces a "Detector Reward" mechanism, which quantifies artifacts and assesses realism using both semantic-level and feature-level synthetic image detectors. We leverage this reward signal with the GRPO algorithm to optimize the entire generation pipeline, significantly enhancing image realism and detail. Furthermore, we propose RealBench, an automated evaluation benchmark employing Detector-Scoring and Arena-Scoring. It enables human-free photorealism assessment, yielding results that are more accurate and aligned with real user experience. Experiments demonstrate that RealGen significantly outperforms general models like GPT-Image-1 and Qwen-Image, as well as specialized photorealistic models like FLUX-Krea, in terms of realism, detail, and aesthetics. The code is available at https://github.com/yejy53/RealGen.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly capable of simulating human behavior, offering cost-effective ways to estimate user responses during the early phases of survey design. While previous studies have examined whether models can reflect individual opinions or attitudes, we argue that a higher-order binding of virtual personas requires successfully approximating not only the opinions of a user as an identified member of a group, but also the nuanced ways in which that user perceives and evaluates those outside the group. In particular, faithfully simulating how humans perceive different social groups is critical for applying LLMs to various political science studies, including timely topics on polarization dynamics, inter-group conflict, and democratic backsliding. To this end, we propose a novel methodology for constructing virtual personas with synthetic user ``backstories" generated as extended, multi-turn interview transcripts. Our generated backstories are longer, rich in detail, and consistent in authentically describing a singular individual, compared to previous methods. We show that virtual personas conditioned on our backstories closely replicate human response distributions (up to an 87\% improvement as measured by Wasserstein Distance) and produce effect sizes that closely match those observed in the original studies. Altogether, our work extends the applicability of LLMs beyond estimating individual self-opinions, enabling their use in a broader range of human studies.

Claim verification is critical for enhancing digital literacy. However, the state-of-the-art single-LLM methods struggle with complex claim verification that involves multi-faceted evidences. Inspired by real-world fact-checking practices, we propose DebateCV, the first claim verification framework that adopts a debate-driven methodology using multiple LLM agents. In our framework, two Debaters take opposing stances on a claim and engage in multi-round argumentation, while a Moderator evaluates the arguments and renders a verdict with justifications. To further improve the performance of the Moderator, we introduce a novel post-training strategy that leverages synthetic debate data generated by the zero-shot DebateCV, effectively addressing the scarcity of real-world debate-driven claim verification data. Experimental results show that our method outperforms existing claim verification methods under varying levels of evidence quality. Our code and dataset are publicly available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/DebateCV-6781.

Existing image editing models struggle to meet real-world demands. Despite excelling in academic benchmarks, they have yet to be widely adopted for real user needs. Datasets that power these models use artificial edits, lacking the scale and ecological validity necessary to address the true diversity of user requests. We introduce REALEDIT, a large-scale image editing dataset with authentic user requests and human-made edits sourced from Reddit. REALEDIT includes a test set of 9300 examples to evaluate models on real user requests. Our results show that existing models fall short on these tasks, highlighting the need for realistic training data. To address this, we introduce 48K training examples and train our REALEDIT model, achieving substantial gains - outperforming competitors by up to 165 Elo points in human judgment and 92 percent relative improvement on the automated VIEScore metric. We deploy our model on Reddit, testing it on new requests, and receive positive feedback. Beyond image editing, we explore REALEDIT's potential in detecting edited images by partnering with a deepfake detection non-profit. Finetuning their model on REALEDIT data improves its F1-score by 14 percentage points, underscoring the dataset's value for broad applications.

Science journalism reports current scientific discoveries to non-specialists, aiming to enable public comprehension of the state of the art. However, this task can be challenging as the audience often lacks specific knowledge about the presented research. To address this challenge, we propose a framework that integrates three LLMs mimicking the real-world writing-reading-feedback-revision workflow, with one LLM acting as the journalist, a smaller LLM as the general public reader, and the third LLM as an editor. The journalist's writing is iteratively refined by feedback from the reader and suggestions from the editor. Our experiments demonstrate that by leveraging the collaboration of two 7B and one 1.8B open-source LLMs, we can generate articles that are more accessible than those generated by existing methods, including advanced models such as GPT-4.

We present a novel approach to integrating scientific knowledge into generative models, enhancing their realism and consistency in image synthesis. First, we introduce Science-T2I, an expert-annotated adversarial dataset comprising adversarial 20k image pairs with 9k prompts, covering wide distinct scientific knowledge categories. Leveraging Science-T2I, we present SciScore, an end-to-end reward model that refines the assessment of generated images based on scientific knowledge, which is achieved by augmenting both the scientific comprehension and visual capabilities of pre-trained CLIP model. Additionally, based on SciScore, we propose a two-stage training framework, comprising a supervised fine-tuning phase and a masked online fine-tuning phase, to incorporate scientific knowledge into existing generative models. Through comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework in establishing new standards for evaluating the scientific realism of generated content. Specifically, SciScore attains performance comparable to human-level, demonstrating a 5% improvement similar to evaluations conducted by experienced human evaluators. Furthermore, by applying our proposed fine-tuning method to FLUX, we achieve a performance enhancement exceeding 50% on SciScore.

Foundation models are increasingly used in scientific research, but evaluating AI-generated scientific work remains challenging. While expert reviews are costly, large language models (LLMs) as proxy reviewers have proven to be unreliable. To address this, we investigate two automatic evaluation metrics, specifically citation count prediction and review score prediction. We parse all papers of OpenReview and augment each submission with its citation count, reference, and research hypothesis. Our findings reveal that citation count prediction is more viable than review score prediction, and predicting scores is more difficult purely from the research hypothesis than from the full paper. Furthermore, we show that a simple prediction model based solely on title and abstract outperforms LLM-based reviewers, though it still falls short of human-level consistency.

As language models (LMs) evolve from chat assistants to long-horizon agents capable of multi-step reasoning and tool use, existing benchmarks remain largely confined to structured or exam-style tasks that fall short of real-world professional demands. To this end, we introduce \OneMillion-Bench OneMillion-Bench, a benchmark of 400 expert-curated tasks spanning Law, Finance, Industry, Healthcare, and Natural Science, built to evaluate agents across economically consequential scenarios. Unlike prior work, the benchmark requires retrieving authoritative sources, resolving conflicting evidence, applying domain-specific rules, and making constraint decisions, where correctness depends as much on the reasoning process as the final answer. We adopt a rubric-based evaluation protocol scoring factual accuracy, logical coherence, practical feasibility, and professional compliance, focused on expert-level problems to ensure meaningful differentiation across agents. Together, \$OneMillion-Bench provides a unified testbed for assessing agentic reliability, professional depth, and practical readiness in domain-intensive scenarios.

There has been a growing interest in enhancing rule-based agent-based models (ABMs) for social media platforms (i.e., X, Reddit) with more realistic large language model (LLM) agents, thereby allowing for a more nuanced study of complex systems. As a result, several LLM-based ABMs have been proposed in the past year. While they hold promise, each simulator is specifically designed to study a particular scenario, making it time-consuming and resource-intensive to explore other phenomena using the same ABM. Additionally, these models simulate only a limited number of agents, whereas real-world social media platforms involve millions of users. To this end, we propose OASIS, a generalizable and scalable social media simulator. OASIS is designed based on real-world social media platforms, incorporating dynamically updated environments (i.e., dynamic social networks and post information), diverse action spaces (i.e., following, commenting), and recommendation systems (i.e., interest-based and hot-score-based). Additionally, OASIS supports large-scale user simulations, capable of modeling up to one million users. With these features, OASIS can be easily extended to different social media platforms to study large-scale group phenomena and behaviors. We replicate various social phenomena, including information spreading, group polarization, and herd effects across X and Reddit platforms. Moreover, we provide observations of social phenomena at different agent group scales. We observe that the larger agent group scale leads to more enhanced group dynamics and more diverse and helpful agents' opinions. These findings demonstrate OASIS's potential as a powerful tool for studying complex systems in digital environments.

The rapid expansion of scholarly literature presents significant challenges in synthesizing comprehensive, high-quality academic surveys. Recent advancements in agentic systems offer considerable promise for automating tasks that traditionally require human expertise, including literature review, synthesis, and iterative refinement. However, existing automated survey-generation solutions often suffer from inadequate quality control, poor formatting, and limited adaptability to iterative feedback, which are core elements intrinsic to scholarly writing. To address these limitations, we introduce ARISE, an Agentic Rubric-guided Iterative Survey Engine designed for automated generation and continuous refinement of academic survey papers. ARISE employs a modular architecture composed of specialized large language model agents, each mirroring distinct scholarly roles such as topic expansion, citation curation, literature summarization, manuscript drafting, and peer-review-based evaluation. Central to ARISE is a rubric-guided iterative refinement loop in which multiple reviewer agents independently assess manuscript drafts using a structured, behaviorally anchored rubric, systematically enhancing the content through synthesized feedback. Evaluating ARISE against state-of-the-art automated systems and recent human-written surveys, our experimental results demonstrate superior performance, achieving an average rubric-aligned quality score of 92.48. ARISE consistently surpasses baseline methods across metrics of comprehensiveness, accuracy, formatting, and overall scholarly rigor. All code, evaluation rubrics, and generated outputs are provided openly at https://github.com/ziwang11112/ARISE

Understanding human behavior and society is a central focus in social sciences, with the rise of generative social science marking a significant paradigmatic shift. By leveraging bottom-up simulations, it replaces costly and logistically challenging traditional experiments with scalable, replicable, and systematic computational approaches for studying complex social dynamics. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have further transformed this research paradigm, enabling the creation of human-like generative social agents and realistic simulacra of society. In this paper, we propose AgentSociety, a large-scale social simulator that integrates LLM-driven agents, a realistic societal environment, and a powerful large-scale simulation engine. Based on the proposed simulator, we generate social lives for over 10k agents, simulating their 5 million interactions both among agents and between agents and their environment. Furthermore, we explore the potential of AgentSociety as a testbed for computational social experiments, focusing on four key social issues: polarization, the spread of inflammatory messages, the effects of universal basic income policies, and the impact of external shocks such as hurricanes. These four issues serve as valuable cases for assessing AgentSociety's support for typical research methods -- such as surveys, interviews, and interventions -- as well as for investigating the patterns, causes, and underlying mechanisms of social issues. The alignment between AgentSociety's outcomes and real-world experimental results not only demonstrates its ability to capture human behaviors and their underlying mechanisms, but also underscores its potential as an important platform for social scientists and policymakers.

Judging the novelty of research ideas is crucial for advancing science, enabling the identification of unexplored directions, and ensuring contributions meaningfully extend existing knowledge rather than reiterate minor variations. However, given the exponential growth of scientific literature, manually judging the novelty of research ideas through literature reviews is labor-intensive, subjective, and infeasible at scale. Therefore, recent efforts have proposed automated approaches for research idea novelty judgment. Yet, evaluation of these approaches remains largely inconsistent and is typically based on non-standardized human evaluations, hindering large-scale, comparable evaluations. To address this, we introduce RINoBench, the first comprehensive benchmark for large-scale evaluation of research idea novelty judgments. It comprises 1,381 research ideas derived from and judged by human experts as well as nine automated evaluation metrics designed to assess both rubric-based novelty scores and textual justifications of novelty judgments. Using this benchmark, we evaluate several state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) on their ability to judge the novelty of research ideas. Our findings reveal that while LLM-generated reasoning closely mirrors human rationales, this alignment does not reliably translate into accurate novelty judgments, which diverge significantly from human gold standard judgments - even among leading reasoning-capable models. Data and code available at: https://github.com/TimSchopf/RINoBench.

The peer review process is crucial for ensuring the quality and reliability of scholarly work, yet assigning suitable reviewers remains a significant challenge. Traditional manual methods are labor-intensive and often ineffective, leading to nonconstructive or biased reviews. This paper introduces the exHarmony (eHarmony but for connecting experts to manuscripts) benchmark, designed to address these challenges by re-imagining the Reviewer Assignment Problem (RAP) as a retrieval task. Utilizing the extensive data from OpenAlex, we propose a novel approach that considers a host of signals from the authors, most similar experts, and the citation relations as potential indicators for a suitable reviewer for a manuscript. This approach allows us to develop a standard benchmark dataset for evaluating the reviewer assignment problem without needing explicit labels. We benchmark various methods, including traditional lexical matching, static neural embeddings, and contextualized neural embeddings, and introduce evaluation metrics that assess both relevance and diversity in the context of RAP. Our results indicate that while traditional methods perform reasonably well, contextualized embeddings trained on scholarly literature show the best performance. The findings underscore the importance of further research to enhance the diversity and effectiveness of reviewer assignments.

How do we communicate with others to achieve our goals? We use our prior experience or advice from others, or construct a candidate utterance by predicting how it will be received. However, our experiences are limited and biased, and reasoning about potential outcomes can be difficult and cognitively challenging. In this paper, we explore how we can leverage Large Language Model (LLM) simulations to help us communicate better. We propose the Explore-Generate-Simulate (EGS) framework, which takes as input any scenario where an individual is communicating to an audience with a goal they want to achieve. EGS (1) explores the solution space by producing a diverse set of advice relevant to the scenario, (2) generates communication candidates conditioned on subsets of the advice, and (3) simulates the reactions from various audiences to determine both the best candidate and advice to use. We evaluate the framework on eight scenarios spanning the ten fundamental processes of interpersonal communication. For each scenario, we collect a dataset of human evaluations across candidates and baselines, and showcase that our framework's chosen candidate is preferred over popular generation mechanisms including Chain-of-Thought. We also find that audience simulations achieve reasonably high agreement with human raters across 5 of the 8 scenarios. Finally, we demonstrate the generality of our framework by applying it to real-world scenarios described by users on web forums. Through evaluations and demonstrations, we show that EGS enhances the effectiveness and outcomes of goal-oriented communication across a variety of situations, thus opening up new possibilities for the application of large language models in revolutionizing communication and decision-making processes.

Generative Agent-Based Modeling (GABM) is an emerging simulation paradigm that combines the reasoning abilities of Large Language Models with traditional Agent-Based Modeling to replicate complex social behaviors, including interactions on social media. While prior work has focused on localized phenomena such as opinion formation and information spread, its potential to capture global network dynamics remains underexplored. This paper addresses this gap by analyzing GABM-based social media simulations through the lens of the Friendship Paradox (FP), a counterintuitive phenomenon where individuals, on average, have fewer friends than their friends. We propose a GABM framework for social media simulations, featuring generative agents that emulate real users with distinct personalities and interests. Using Twitter datasets on the US 2020 Election and the QAnon conspiracy, we show that the FP emerges naturally in GABM simulations. Consistent with real-world observations, the simulations unveil a hierarchical structure, where agents preferentially connect with others displaying higher activity or influence. Additionally, we find that infrequent connections primarily drive the FP, reflecting patterns in real networks. These findings validate GABM as a robust tool for modeling global social media phenomena and highlight its potential for advancing social science by enabling nuanced analysis of user behavior.

Recent advancements in visual generative models have enabled high-quality image and video generation, opening diverse applications. However, evaluating these models often demands sampling hundreds or thousands of images or videos, making the process computationally expensive, especially for diffusion-based models with inherently slow sampling. Moreover, existing evaluation methods rely on rigid pipelines that overlook specific user needs and provide numerical results without clear explanations. In contrast, humans can quickly form impressions of a model's capabilities by observing only a few samples. To mimic this, we propose the Evaluation Agent framework, which employs human-like strategies for efficient, dynamic, multi-round evaluations using only a few samples per round, while offering detailed, user-tailored analyses. It offers four key advantages: 1) efficiency, 2) promptable evaluation tailored to diverse user needs, 3) explainability beyond single numerical scores, and 4) scalability across various models and tools. Experiments show that Evaluation Agent reduces evaluation time to 10% of traditional methods while delivering comparable results. The Evaluation Agent framework is fully open-sourced to advance research in visual generative models and their efficient evaluation.

The promise of human behavioral simulation--general-purpose computational agents that replicate human behavior across domains--could enable broad applications in policymaking and social science. We present a novel agent architecture that simulates the attitudes and behaviors of 1,052 real individuals--applying large language models to qualitative interviews about their lives, then measuring how well these agents replicate the attitudes and behaviors of the individuals that they represent. The generative agents replicate participants' responses on the General Social Survey 85% as accurately as participants replicate their own answers two weeks later, and perform comparably in predicting personality traits and outcomes in experimental replications. Our architecture reduces accuracy biases across racial and ideological groups compared to agents given demographic descriptions. This work provides a foundation for new tools that can help investigate individual and collective behavior.

Scientific writing is an expert-domain task that demands deep domain knowledge, task-specific requirements and reasoning capabilities that leverage the domain knowledge to satisfy the task specifications. While scientific text generation has been widely studied, its evaluation remains a challenging and open problem. It is critical to develop models that can be reliably deployed for evaluating diverse open-ended scientific writing tasks while adhering to their distinct requirements. However, existing LLM-based judges and reward models are primarily optimized for general-purpose benchmarks with fixed scoring rubrics and evaluation criteria. Consequently, they often fail to reason over sparse knowledge of scientific domains when interpreting task-dependent and multi-faceted criteria. Moreover, fine-tuning for each individual task is costly and impractical for low-resource settings. To bridge these gaps, we propose cost-efficient, open-source reward models tailored for scientific writing evaluation. We introduce a two-stage training framework that initially optimizes scientific evaluation preferences and then refines reasoning capabilities. Our multi-aspect evaluation design and joint training across diverse tasks enable fine-grained assessment and robustness to dynamic criteria and scoring rubrics. Experimental analysis shows that our training regime strongly improves LLM-based scientific writing evaluation. Our models generalize effectively across tasks and to previously unseen scientific writing evaluation settings, allowing a single trained evaluator to be reused without task-specific retraining.

AI agents powered by large language models exhibit strong reasoning and problem-solving capabilities, enabling them to assist scientific research tasks such as formula derivation and code generation. However, whether these agents can reliably perform end-to-end reproduction from real scientific papers remains an open question. We introduce PRBench, a benchmark of 30 expert-curated tasks spanning 11 subfields of physics. Each task requires an agent to comprehend the methodology of a published paper, implement the corresponding algorithms from scratch, and produce quantitative results matching the original publication. Agents are provided only with the task instruction and paper content, and operate in a sandboxed execution environment. All tasks are contributed by domain experts from over 20 research groups at the School of Physics, Peking University, each grounded in a real published paper and validated through end-to-end reproduction with verified ground-truth results and detailed scoring rubrics. Using an agentified assessment pipeline, we evaluate a set of coding agents on PRBench and analyze their capabilities across key dimensions of scientific reasoning and execution. The best-performing agent, OpenAI Codex powered by GPT-5.3-Codex, achieves a mean overall score of 34%. All agents exhibit a zero end-to-end callback success rate, with particularly poor performance in data accuracy and code correctness. We further identify systematic failure modes, including errors in formula implementation, inability to debug numerical simulations, and fabrication of output data. Overall, PRBench provides a rigorous benchmark for evaluating progress toward autonomous scientific research.

Social computing prototypes probe the social behaviors that may arise in an envisioned system design. This prototyping practice is currently limited to recruiting small groups of people. Unfortunately, many challenges do not arise until a system is populated at a larger scale. Can a designer understand how a social system might behave when populated, and make adjustments to the design before the system falls prey to such challenges? We introduce social simulacra, a prototyping technique that generates a breadth of realistic social interactions that may emerge when a social computing system is populated. Social simulacra take as input the designer's description of a community's design -- goal, rules, and member personas -- and produce as output an instance of that design with simulated behavior, including posts, replies, and anti-social behaviors. We demonstrate that social simulacra shift the behaviors that they generate appropriately in response to design changes, and that they enable exploration of "what if?" scenarios where community members or moderators intervene. To power social simulacra, we contribute techniques for prompting a large language model to generate thousands of distinct community members and their social interactions with each other; these techniques are enabled by the observation that large language models' training data already includes a wide variety of positive and negative behavior on social media platforms. In evaluations, we show that participants are often unable to distinguish social simulacra from actual community behavior and that social computing designers successfully refine their social computing designs when using social simulacra.

We develop a simulation framework for studying misinformation spread within online social networks that blends agent-based modeling and natural language processing techniques. While many other agent-based simulations exist in this space, questions over their fidelity and generalization to existing networks in part hinders their ability to provide actionable insights. To partially address these concerns, we create a 'digital clone' of a known misinformation sharing network by downloading social media histories for over ten thousand of its users. We parse these histories to both extract the structure of the network and model the nuanced ways in which information is shared and spread among its members. Unlike many other agent-based methods in this space, information sharing between users in our framework is sensitive to topic of discussion, user preferences, and online community dynamics. To evaluate the fidelity of our method, we seed our cloned network with a set of posts recorded in the base network and compare propagation dynamics between the two, observing reasonable agreement across the twin networks over a variety of metrics. Lastly, we explore how the cloned network may serve as a flexible, low-cost testbed for misinformation countermeasure evaluation and red teaming analysis. We hope the tools explored here augment existing efforts in the space and unlock new opportunities for misinformation countermeasure evaluation, a field that may become increasingly important to consider with the anticipated rise of misinformation campaigns fueled by generative artificial intelligence.

The public availability of collections containing user preferences is of vital importance for performing offline evaluations in the field of recommender systems. However, the number of rating datasets is limited because of the costs required for their creation and the fear of violating the privacy of the users by sharing them. For this reason, numerous research attempts investigated the creation of synthetic collections of ratings using generative approaches. Nevertheless, these datasets are usually not reliable enough for conducting an evaluation campaign. In this paper, we propose a method for creating synthetic datasets with a configurable number of users that mimic the characteristics of already existing ones. We empirically validated the proposed approach by exploiting the synthetic datasets for evaluating different recommenders and by comparing the results with the ones obtained using real datasets.

Advances in AI-assisted research have introduced powerful tools for literature retrieval, hypothesis generation, experimentation, and manuscript preparation. However, systems remain fragmented and lack human-centred workflows. To address these gaps, we introduce AIssistant, an agentic, open-source Human-AI collaborative framework designed to simplify the end-to-end creation of scientific workflows. Since our development is still in an early stage, we present here the first experiments with AIssistant for perspective and review research papers in machine learning. Our system integrates modular tools and agents for literature synthesis, section-wise experimentation, citation management, and automatic LaTeX paper text generation, while maintaining human oversight at every stage to ensure accuracy, coherence, and scholarly rigour. We conducted a comprehensive evaluation across three layers: (1) Independent Human Review, following NeurIPS double-blind standards; (2) Automated LLM Review, using GPT-5 as a scalable human review proxy; and (3) Program Chair Oversight, where the chair monitors the entire review process and makes final validation and acceptance decisions. The results demonstrate that AIssistant improves drafting efficiency and thematic consistency. Nonetheless, Human-AI collaboration remains essential for maintaining factual correctness, methodological soundness, and ethical compliance. Despite its effectiveness, we identify key limitations, including hallucinated citations, difficulty adapting to dynamic paper structures, and incomplete integration of multimodal content.

Simulating a recommendation system in a controlled environment, to identify specific behaviors and user preferences, requires highly flexible synthetic data generation models capable of mimicking the patterns and trends of real datasets. In this context, we propose HYDRA, a novel preferences data generation model driven by three main factors: user-item interaction level, item popularity, and user engagement level. The key innovations of the proposed process include the ability to generate user communities characterized by similar item adoptions, reflecting real-world social influences and trends. Additionally, HYDRA considers item popularity and user engagement as mixtures of different probability distributions, allowing for a more realistic simulation of diverse scenarios. This approach enhances the model's capacity to simulate a wide range of real-world cases, capturing the complexity and variability found in actual user behavior. We demonstrate the effectiveness of HYDRA through extensive experiments on well-known benchmark datasets. The results highlight its capability to replicate real-world data patterns, offering valuable insights for developing and testing recommendation systems in a controlled and realistic manner. The code used to perform the experiments is publicly available at https://github.com/SimoneMungari/HYDRA.

Traditional sociological research often relies on human participation, which, though effective, is expensive, challenging to scale, and with ethical concerns. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) highlight their potential to simulate human behavior, enabling the replication of individual responses and facilitating studies on many interdisciplinary studies. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive survey of this field, illustrating the recent progress in simulation driven by LLM-empowered agents. We categorize the simulations into three types: (1) Individual Simulation, which mimics specific individuals or demographic groups; (2) Scenario Simulation, where multiple agents collaborate to achieve goals within specific contexts; and (3) Society Simulation, which models interactions within agent societies to reflect the complexity and variety of real-world dynamics. These simulations follow a progression, ranging from detailed individual modeling to large-scale societal phenomena. We provide a detailed discussion of each simulation type, including the architecture or key components of the simulation, the classification of objectives or scenarios and the evaluation method. Afterward, we summarize commonly used datasets and benchmarks. Finally, we discuss the trends across these three types of simulation. A repository for the related sources is at {https://github.com/FudanDISC/SocialAgent}.

Evaluation has traditionally focused on ranking candidates for a specific skill. Modern generalist models, such as Large Language Models (LLMs), decidedly outpace this paradigm. Open-ended evaluation systems, where candidate models are compared on user-submitted prompts, have emerged as a popular solution. Despite their many advantages, we show that the current Elo-based rating systems can be susceptible to and even reinforce biases in data, intentional or accidental, due to their sensitivity to redundancies. To address this issue, we propose evaluation as a 3-player game, and introduce novel game-theoretic solution concepts to ensure robustness to redundancy. We show that our method leads to intuitive ratings and provide insights into the competitive landscape of LLM development.

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive results in natural language understanding, yet their reasoning capabilities remain limited when operating as single agents. Multi-Agent Debate (MAD) has been proposed to address this limitation by enabling collaborative reasoning among multiple models in a round-table debate manner. While effective, MAD introduces substantial computational overhead due to the number of agents involved and the frequent communication required. In this paper, we propose MARS (Multi-Agent Review System), a role-based collaboration framework inspired by the review process. In MARS, an author agent generates an initial solution, reviewer agents provide decisions and comments independently, and a meta-reviewer integrates the feedback to make the final decision and guide further revision. This design enhances reasoning quality while avoiding costly reviewer-to-reviewer interactions, thereby controlling token consumption and inference time. We compared MARS with both MAD and other state-of-the-art reasoning strategies across multiple benchmarks. Extensive experiments with different LLMs show that MARS matches the accuracy of MAD while reducing both token usage and inference time by approximately 50\%. Code is available at https://github.com/xwang97/MARS.

We present RecoWorld, a blueprint for building simulated environments tailored to agentic recommender systems. Such environments give agents a proper training space where they can learn from errors without impacting real users. RecoWorld distinguishes itself with a dual-view architecture: a simulated user and an agentic recommender engage in multi-turn interactions aimed at maximizing user retention. The user simulator reviews recommended items, updates its mindset, and when sensing potential user disengagement, generates reflective instructions. The agentic recommender adapts its recommendations by incorporating these user instructions and reasoning traces, creating a dynamic feedback loop that actively engages users. This process leverages the exceptional reasoning capabilities of modern LLMs. We explore diverse content representations within the simulator, including text-based, multimodal, and semantic ID modeling, and discuss how multi-turn RL enables the recommender to refine its strategies through iterative interactions. RecoWorld also supports multi-agent simulations, allowing creators to simulate the responses of targeted user populations. It marks an important first step toward recommender systems where users and agents collaboratively shape personalized information streams. We envision new interaction paradigms where "user instructs, recommender responds," jointly optimizing user retention and engagement.

Large language model (LLM) simulations of human behavior have the potential to revolutionize the social and behavioral sciences, if and only if they faithfully reflect real human behaviors. Current evaluations are fragmented, based on bespoke tasks and metrics, creating a patchwork of incomparable results. To address this, we introduce SimBench, the first large-scale, standardized benchmark for a robust, reproducible science of LLM simulation. By unifying 20 diverse datasets covering tasks from moral decision-making to economic choice across a large global participant pool, SimBench provides the necessary foundation to ask fundamental questions about when, how, and why LLM simulations succeed or fail. We show that, while even the best LLMs today have limited simulation ability (score: 40.80/100), performance scales log-linearly with model size. Simulation performance is not improved by increased inference-time compute. We demonstrate an alignment-simulation trade-off: instruction-tuning improves performance on low-entropy (consensus) questions but degrades it on high-entropy (diverse) ones. Models particularly struggle when simulating specific demographic groups. Finally, we demonstrate that simulation ability correlates most strongly with deep, knowledge-intensive reasoning (MMLU-Pro, r=0.939). By making progress measurable, we aim to accelerate the development of more faithful LLM simulators.

Peer review in grant evaluation informs funding decisions, but the contents of peer review reports are rarely analyzed. In this work, we develop a thoroughly tested pipeline to analyze the texts of grant peer review reports using methods from applied Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine learning. We start by developing twelve categories reflecting content of grant peer review reports that are of interest to research funders. This is followed by multiple human annotators' iterative annotation of these categories in a novel text corpus of grant peer review reports submitted to the Swiss National Science Foundation. After validating the human annotation, we use the annotated texts to fine-tune pre-trained transformer models to classify these categories at scale, while conducting several robustness and validation checks. Our results show that many categories can be reliably identified by human annotators and machine learning approaches. However, the choice of text classification approach considerably influences the classification performance. We also find a high correspondence between out-of-sample classification performance and human annotators' perceived difficulty in identifying categories. Our results and publicly available fine-tuned transformer models will allow researchers and research funders and anybody interested in peer review to examine and report on the contents of these reports in a structured manner. Ultimately, we hope our approach can contribute to ensuring the quality and trustworthiness of grant peer review.

Optimizing the phrasing of argumentative text is crucial in higher education and professional development. However, assessing whether and how the different claims in a text should be revised is a hard task, especially for novice writers. In this work, we explore the main challenges to identifying argumentative claims in need of specific revisions. By learning from collaborative editing behaviors in online debates, we seek to capture implicit revision patterns in order to develop approaches aimed at guiding writers in how to further improve their arguments. We systematically compare the ability of common word embedding models to capture the differences between different versions of the same text, and we analyze their impact on various types of writing issues. To deal with the noisy nature of revision-based corpora, we propose a new sampling strategy based on revision distance. Opposed to approaches from prior work, such sampling can be done without employing additional annotations and judgments. Moreover, we provide evidence that using contextual information and domain knowledge can further improve prediction results. How useful a certain type of context is, depends on the issue the claim is suffering from, though.

Information ecosystems increasingly shape how people internalize exposure to adverse digital experiences, raising concerns about the long-term consequences for information health. In modern search and recommendation systems, ranking and personalization policies play a central role in shaping such exposure and its long-term effects on users. To study these effects in a controlled setting, we present FrameRef, a large-scale dataset of 1,073,740 systematically reframed claims across five framing dimensions: authoritative, consensus, emotional, prestige, and sensationalist, and propose a simulation-based framework for modeling sequential information exposure and reinforcement dynamics characteristic of ranking and recommendation systems. Within this framework, we construct framing-sensitive agent personas by fine-tuning language models with framing-conditioned loss attenuation, inducing targeted biases while preserving overall task competence. Using Monte Carlo trajectory sampling, we show that small, systematic shifts in acceptance and confidence can compound over time, producing substantial divergence in cumulative information health trajectories. Human evaluation further confirms that FrameRef's generated framings measurably affect human judgment. Together, our dataset and framework provide a foundation for systematic information health research through simulation, complementing and informing responsible human-centered research. We release FrameRef, code, documentation, human evaluation data, and persona adapter models at https://github.com/infosenselab/frameref.

Recommender systems play a central role in numerous real-life applications, yet evaluating their performance remains a significant challenge due to the gap between offline metrics and online behaviors. Given the scarcity and limits (e.g., privacy issues) of real user data, we introduce SimUSER, an agent framework that serves as believable and cost-effective human proxies. SimUSER first identifies self-consistent personas from historical data, enriching user profiles with unique backgrounds and personalities. Then, central to this evaluation are users equipped with persona, memory, perception, and brain modules, engaging in interactions with the recommender system. SimUSER exhibits closer alignment with genuine humans than prior work, both at micro and macro levels. Additionally, we conduct insightful experiments to explore the effects of thumbnails on click rates, the exposure effect, and the impact of reviews on user engagement. Finally, we refine recommender system parameters based on offline A/B test results, resulting in improved user engagement in the real world.

The pursuit of robot generalists - instructable agents capable of performing diverse tasks across diverse environments - demands rigorous and scalable evaluation. Yet real-world testing of robot policies remains fundamentally constrained: it is labor-intensive, slow, unsafe at scale, and difficult to reproduce. Existing simulation benchmarks are similarly limited, as they train and test policies within the same synthetic domains and cannot assess models trained from real-world demonstrations or alternative simulation environments. As policies expand in scope and complexity, these barriers only intensify, since defining "success" in robotics often hinges on nuanced human judgments of execution quality. In this paper, we introduce a new benchmarking framework that overcomes these challenges by shifting VLA evaluation into large-scale simulated environments augmented with online human feedback. Leveraging advances in vision-language models, 2D-to-3D generative modeling, and differentiable rendering, our approach automatically converts video demonstrations from widely used robot datasets into simulated counterparts. Within these digital twins, we assess VLA policies using both automated VLM-guided scoring and scalable human preference judgments collected from crowdworkers, transforming human involvement from tedious scene setup, resetting, and safety supervision into lightweight preference comparisons. To measure robustness, we systematically perturb simulated environments along multiple axes, such as textures and object placements, stress-testing policy generalization under controlled variation. The result is a continuously evolving, reproducible, and scalable benchmark for real-world trained robot manipulation policies, addressing a critical missing capability in today's robotics landscape.

Large language models (LLMs) are currently applied to scientific paper evaluation by assigning an absolute score to each paper independently. However, since score scales vary across conferences, time periods, and evaluation criteria, models trained on absolute scores are prone to fitting narrow, context-specific rules rather than developing robust scholarly judgment. To overcome this limitation, we propose shifting paper evaluation from isolated scoring to collaborative ranking. In particular, we design Comparison-Native framework for Paper Evaluation (CNPE), integrating comparison into both data construction and model learning. We first propose a graph-based similarity ranking algorithm to facilitate the sampling of more informative and discriminative paper pairs from a collection. We then enhance relative quality judgment through supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning with comparison-based rewards. At inference, the model performs pairwise comparisons over sampled paper pairs and aggregates these preference signals into a global relative quality ranking. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework achieves an average relative improvement of 21.8\% over the strong baseline DeepReview-14B, while exhibiting robust generalization to five previously unseen datasets. https://github.com/ECNU-Text-Computing/ComparisonReview{Code}.

Multi-agent large language model (LLM) and vision-language model (VLM) debate systems employ specialized roles for complex problem-solving, yet model specializations are not leveraged to decide which model should fill which role. We propose dynamic role assignment, a framework that runs a Meta-Debate to select suitable agents before the actual debate. The meta-debate has two stages: (1) proposal, where candidates provide role-tailored arguments, and (2) peer review, where proposals are scored with data and role-specific criteria to choose the best agent for each position. We evaluate our method on LLM problem solving benchmarks. Applied on top of existing debate systems, our approach consistently outperforms uniform assignments (filling all roles with the same model) by up to 74.8% and random assignments (assigning models to roles without considering their suitability) by up to 29.7%, depending on the task and the specific assignment. This work establishes a new paradigm for multi-agent system design, shifting from static agent deployment to dynamic and capability-aware selection.

The rigorous evaluation of the novelty of a scientific paper is, even for human scientists, a challenging task. With the increasing interest in AI scientists and AI involvement in scientific idea generation and paper writing, it also becomes increasingly important that this task be automatable and reliable, lest both human attention and compute tokens be wasted on ideas that have already been explored. Due to the challenge of quantifying ground-truth novelty, however, existing novelty metrics for scientific papers generally validate their results against noisy, confounded signals such as citation counts or peer review scores. These proxies can conflate novelty with impact, quality, or reviewer preference, which in turn makes it harder to assess how well a given metric actually evaluates novelty. We therefore propose an axiomatic benchmark for scientific novelty metrics. We first define a set of axioms that a well-behaved novelty metric should satisfy, grounded in human scientific norms and practice, then evaluate existing metrics across ten tasks spanning three domains of AI research. Our results reveal that no existing metric satisfies all axioms consistently, and that metrics fail on systematically different axioms, reflecting their underlying architectures. Additionally, we show that combining metrics of complementary architectures leads to consistent improvements on the benchmark, with per-axiom weighting achieving 90.1% versus 71.5% for the best individual metric, suggesting that developing architecturally diverse metrics is a promising direction for future work. We release the benchmark code as supplementary material to encourage the development of more robust scientific literature novelty metrics.

Despite the growing adoption of large language models (LLMs) in scientific research workflows, automated support for academic rebuttal, a crucial step in academic communication and peer review, remains largely underexplored. Existing approaches typically rely on off-the-shelf LLMs or simple pipelines, which struggle with long-context understanding and often fail to produce targeted and persuasive responses. In this paper, we propose DRPG, an agentic framework for automatic academic rebuttal generation that operates through four steps: Decompose reviews into atomic concerns, Retrieve relevant evidence from the paper, Plan rebuttal strategies, and Generate responses accordingly. Notably, the Planner in DRPG reaches over 98% accuracy in identifying the most feasible rebuttal direction. Experiments on data from top-tier conferences demonstrate that DRPG significantly outperforms existing rebuttal pipelines and achieves performance beyond the average human level using only an 8B model. Our analysis further demonstrates the effectiveness of the planner design and its value in providing multi-perspective and explainable suggestions. We also showed that DRPG works well in a more complex multi-round setting. These results highlight the effectiveness of DRPG and its potential to provide high-quality rebuttal content and support the scaling of academic discussions. Codes for this work are available at https://github.com/ulab-uiuc/DRPG-RebuttalAgent.

Deep research systems are widely used for multi-step web research, analysis, and cross-source synthesis, yet their evaluation remains challenging. Existing benchmarks often require annotation-intensive task construction, rely on static evaluation dimensions, or fail to reliably verify facts when citations are missing. To bridge these gaps, we introduce DeepResearchEval, an automated framework for deep research task construction and agentic evaluation. For task construction, we propose a persona-driven pipeline generating realistic, complex research tasks anchored in diverse user profiles, applying a two-stage filter Task Qualification and Search Necessity to retain only tasks requiring multi-source evidence integration and external retrieval. For evaluation, we propose an agentic pipeline with two components: an Adaptive Point-wise Quality Evaluation that dynamically derives task-specific evaluation dimensions, criteria, and weights conditioned on each generated task, and an Active Fact-Checking that autonomously extracts and verifies report statements via web search, even when citations are missing.

With generative AI advances, the exciting potential for autonomous agents to manage daily tasks via natural language commands has emerged. However, cur rent agents are primarily created and tested in simplified synthetic environments, substantially limiting real-world scenario representation. In this paper, we build an environment for agent command and control that is highly realistic and reproducible. Specifically, we focus on agents that perform tasks on websites, and we create an environment with fully functional websites from four common domains: e-commerce, social forum discussions, collaborative software development, and content management. Our environment is enriched with tools (e.g., a map) and external knowledge bases (e.g., user manuals) to encourage human-like task-solving. Building upon our environment, we release a set of benchmark tasks focusing on evaluating the functional correctness of task completions. The tasks in our benchmark are diverse, long-horizon, and are designed to emulate tasks that humans routinely perform on the internet. We design and implement several autonomous agents, integrating recent techniques such as reasoning before acting. The results demonstrate that solving complex tasks is challenging: our best GPT-4-based agent only achieves an end-to-end task success rate of 10.59%. These results highlight the need for further development of robust agents, that current state-of-the-art LMs are far from perfect performance in these real-life tasks, and that WebArena can be used to measure such progress. Our code, data, environment reproduction resources, and video demonstrations are publicly available at https://webarena.dev/.

In many domains of argumentation, people's arguments are driven by so-called attitude roots, i.e., underlying beliefs and world views, and their corresponding attitude themes. Given the strength of these latent drivers of arguments, recent work in psychology suggests that instead of directly countering surface-level reasoning (e.g., falsifying given premises), one should follow an argumentation style inspired by the Jiu-Jitsu 'soft' combat system (Hornsey and Fielding, 2017): first, identify an arguer's attitude roots and themes, and then choose a prototypical rebuttal that is aligned with those drivers instead of invalidating those. In this work, we are the first to explore Jiu-Jitsu argumentation for peer review by proposing the novel task of attitude and theme-guided rebuttal generation. To this end, we enrich an existing dataset for discourse structure in peer reviews with attitude roots, attitude themes, and canonical rebuttals. To facilitate this process, we recast established annotation concepts from the domain of peer reviews (e.g., aspects a review sentence is relating to) and train domain-specific models. We then propose strong rebuttal generation strategies, which we benchmark on our novel dataset for the task of end-to-end attitude and theme-guided rebuttal generation and two subtasks.

Identifying and articulating limitations is essential for transparent and rigorous scientific research. However, zero-shot large language models (LLMs) approach often produce superficial or general limitation statements (e.g., dataset bias or generalizability). They usually repeat limitations reported by authors without looking at deeper methodological issues and contextual gaps. This problem is made worse because many authors disclose only partial or trivial limitations. We propose LimAgents, a multi-agent LLM framework for generating substantive limitations. LimAgents integrates OpenReview comments and author-stated limitations to provide stronger ground truth. It also uses cited and citing papers to capture broader contextual weaknesses. In this setup, different agents have specific roles as sequential role: some extract explicit limitations, others analyze methodological gaps, some simulate the viewpoint of a peer reviewer, and a citation agent places the work within the larger body of literature. A Judge agent refines their outputs, and a Master agent consolidates them into a clear set. This structure allows for systematic identification of explicit, implicit, peer review-focused, and literature-informed limitations. Moreover, traditional NLP metrics like BLEU, ROUGE, and cosine similarity rely heavily on n-gram or embedding overlap. They often overlook semantically similar limitations. To address this, we introduce a pointwise evaluation protocol that uses an LLM-as-a-Judge to measure coverage more accurately. Experiments show that LimAgents substantially improve performance. The RAG + multi-agent GPT-4o mini configuration achieves a +15.51% coverage gain over zero-shot baselines, while the Llama 3 8B multi-agent setup yields a +4.41% improvement.

Many recent improvements in NLP stem from the development and use of large pre-trained language models (PLMs) with billions of parameters. Large model sizes makes computational cost one of the main limiting factors for training and evaluating such models; and has raised severe concerns about the sustainability, reproducibility, and inclusiveness for researching PLMs. These concerns are often based on personal experiences and observations. However, there had not been any large-scale surveys that investigate them. In this work, we provide a first attempt to quantify these concerns regarding three topics, namely, environmental impact, equity, and impact on peer reviewing. By conducting a survey with 312 participants from the NLP community, we capture existing (dis)parities between different and within groups with respect to seniority, academia, and industry; and their impact on the peer reviewing process. For each topic, we provide an analysis and devise recommendations to mitigate found disparities, some of which already successfully implemented. Finally, we discuss additional concerns raised by many participants in free-text responses.

Workplace toxicity is widely recognized as detrimental to organizational culture, yet quantifying its direct impact on operational efficiency remains methodologically challenging due to the ethical and practical difficulties of reproducing conflict in human subjects. This study leverages Large Language Model (LLM) based Multi-Agent Systems to simulate 1-on-1 adversarial debates, creating a controlled "sociological sandbox". We employ a Monte Carlo method to simulate hundrets of discussions, measuring the convergence time (defined as the number of arguments required to reach a conclusion) between a baseline control group and treatment groups involving agents with "toxic" system prompts. Our results demonstrate a statistically significant increase of approximately 25\% in the duration of conversations involving toxic participants. We propose that this "latency of toxicity" serves as a proxy for financial damage in corporate and academic settings. Furthermore, we demonstrate that agent-based modeling provides a reproducible, ethical alternative to human-subject research for measuring the mechanics of social friction.

The increasing capability of Large Language Models to act as human-like social agents raises two important questions in the area of opinion dynamics. First, whether these agents can generate effective arguments that could be injected into the online discourse to steer the public opinion. Second, whether artificial agents can interact with each other to reproduce dynamics of persuasion typical of human social systems, opening up opportunities for studying synthetic social systems as faithful proxies for opinion dynamics in human populations. To address these questions, we designed a synthetic persuasion dialogue scenario on the topic of climate change, where a 'convincer' agent generates a persuasive argument for a 'skeptic' agent, who subsequently assesses whether the argument changed its internal opinion state. Different types of arguments were generated to incorporate different linguistic dimensions underpinning psycho-linguistic theories of opinion change. We then asked human judges to evaluate the persuasiveness of machine-generated arguments. Arguments that included factual knowledge, markers of trust, expressions of support, and conveyed status were deemed most effective according to both humans and agents, with humans reporting a marked preference for knowledge-based arguments. Our experimental framework lays the groundwork for future in-silico studies of opinion dynamics, and our findings suggest that artificial agents have the potential of playing an important role in collective processes of opinion formation in online social media.

Assessing the reproducibility of social science papers is essential for promoting rigor in research processes, but manual assessment is costly. With recent advances in agentic AI systems (i.e., AI agents), we seek to evaluate their capability to automate this process. However, existing benchmarks for reproducing research papers (1) focus solely on reproducing results using provided code and data without assessing their consistency with the paper, (2) oversimplify real-world scenarios, and (3) lack necessary diversity in data formats and programming languages. To address these issues, we introduce REPRO-Bench, a collection of 112 task instances, each representing a social science paper with a publicly available reproduction report. The agents are tasked with assessing the reproducibility of the paper based on the original paper PDF and the corresponding reproduction package. REPRO-Bench features end-to-end evaluation tasks on the reproducibility of social science papers with complexity comparable to real-world assessments. We evaluate three representative AI agents on REPRO-Bench, with the best-performing agent achieving an accuracy of only 21.4%. Building on our empirical analysis, we develop REPRO-Agent, which improves the highest accuracy achieved by existing agents by 71%. We conclude that more advanced AI agents should be developed to automate real-world reproducibility assessment. REPRO-Bench is publicly available at https://github.com/uiuc-kang-lab/REPRO-Bench.

Document editing has become a pervasive component of the production of information, with version control systems enabling edits to be efficiently stored and applied. In light of this, the task of learning distributed representations of edits has been recently proposed. With this in mind, we propose a novel approach that employs variational inference to learn a continuous latent space of vector representations to capture the underlying semantic information with regard to the document editing process. We achieve this by introducing a latent variable to explicitly model the aforementioned features. This latent variable is then combined with a document representation to guide the generation of an edited version of this document. Additionally, to facilitate standardized automatic evaluation of edit representations, which has heavily relied on direct human input thus far, we also propose a suite of downstream tasks, PEER, specifically designed to measure the quality of edit representations in the context of natural language processing.

Modeling human behavior in urban environments is fundamental for social science, behavioral studies, and urban planning. Prior work often rely on rigid, hand-crafted rules, limiting their ability to simulate nuanced intentions, plans, and adaptive behaviors. Addressing these challenges, we envision an urban simulator (CitySim), capitalizing on breakthroughs in human-level intelligence exhibited by large language models. In CitySim, agents generate realistic daily schedules using a recursive value-driven approach that balances mandatory activities, personal habits, and situational factors. To enable long-term, lifelike simulations, we endow agents with beliefs, long-term goals, and spatial memory for navigation. CitySim exhibits closer alignment with real humans than prior work, both at micro and macro levels. Additionally, we conduct insightful experiments by modeling tens of thousands of agents and evaluating their collective behaviors under various real-world scenarios, including estimating crowd density, predicting place popularity, and assessing well-being. Our results highlight CitySim as a scalable, flexible testbed for understanding and forecasting urban phenomena.

High-quality datasets are fundamental to training and evaluating machine learning models, yet their creation-especially with accurate human annotations-remains a significant challenge. Many dataset paper submissions lack originality, diversity, or rigorous quality control, and these shortcomings are often overlooked during peer review. Submissions also frequently omit essential details about dataset construction and properties. While existing tools such as datasheets aim to promote transparency, they are largely descriptive and do not provide standardized, measurable methods for evaluating data quality. Similarly, metadata requirements at conferences promote accountability but are inconsistently enforced. To address these limitations, this position paper advocates for the integration of systematic, rubric-based evaluation metrics into the dataset review process-particularly as submission volumes continue to grow. We also explore scalable, cost-effective methods for synthetic data generation, including dedicated tools and LLM-as-a-judge approaches, to support more efficient evaluation. As a call to action, we introduce DataRubrics, a structured framework for assessing the quality of both human- and model-generated datasets. Leveraging recent advances in LLM-based evaluation, DataRubrics offers a reproducible, scalable, and actionable solution for dataset quality assessment, enabling both authors and reviewers to uphold higher standards in data-centric research. We also release code to support reproducibility of LLM-based evaluations at https://github.com/datarubrics/datarubrics.

Web agents require massive trajectories to generalize, yet real-world training is constrained by network latency, rate limits, and safety risks. We introduce WebWorld series, the first open-web simulator trained at scale. While existing simulators are restricted to closed environments with thousands of trajectories, WebWorld leverages a scalable data pipeline to train on 1M+ open-web interactions, supporting reasoning, multi-format data, and long-horizon simulations of 30+ steps. For intrinsic evaluation, we introduce WebWorld-Bench with dual metrics spanning nine dimensions, where WebWorld achieves simulation performance comparable to Gemini-3-Pro. For extrinsic evaluation, Qwen3-14B trained on WebWorld-synthesized trajectories improves by +9.2\% on WebArena, reaching performance comparable to GPT-4o. WebWorld enables effective inference-time search, outperforming GPT-5 as a world model. Beyond web simulation, WebWorld exhibits cross-domain generalization to code, GUI, and game environments, providing a replicable recipe for world model construction.

Despite the growing adoption of large language models (LLMs) in academic workflows, their capabilities remain limited when it comes to supporting high-quality scientific writing. Most existing systems are designed for general-purpose scientific text generation and fail to meet the sophisticated demands of research communication beyond surface-level polishing, such as conceptual coherence across sections. Furthermore, academic writing is inherently iterative and revision-driven, a process not well supported by direct prompting-based paradigms. To address these scenarios, we propose a human-AI collaboration framework for academic paper revision. We first introduce a comprehensive dataset of 7,040 research papers from top-tier venues annotated with over 140,000 instruction-response pairs that reflect realistic, section-level scientific revisions. Building on the dataset, we develop XtraGPT, the first suite of open-source LLMs, designed to provide context-aware, instruction-guided writing assistance, ranging from 1.5B to 14B parameters. Extensive experiments validate that XtraGPT significantly outperforms same-scale baselines and approaches the quality of proprietary systems. Both automated preference assessments and human evaluations confirm the effectiveness of our models in improving scientific drafts.

Online social networks serve as major platforms for disseminating both real and fake news. Many users--intentionally or unintentionally--spread harmful content, misinformation, and rumors in domains such as politics and business. Consequently, user credibility assessment has become a prominent area of research in recent years. Most existing methods suffer from two key limitations. First, they treat credibility as a binary task, labeling users as either genuine or fake, whereas real-world applications often demand a more nuanced, multilevel evaluation. Second, they rely on only a subset of relevant features, which constrains their predictive performance. In this paper, we address the lack of a dataset suitable for multilevel credibility assessment by first devising a collection method tailored to this task. We then propose the MultiCred model, which assigns users to one of several credibility tiers based on a rich and diverse set of features extracted from their profiles, tweets, and comments. MultiCred leverages deep language models for textual analysis and deep neural networks for non-textual data processing. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that MultiCred significantly outperforms existing approaches across multiple accuracy metrics. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Mohammad-Moradi/MultiCred.