[2605.03202] Stop Automating Peer Review Without Rigorous Evaluation
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Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence
arXiv:2605.03202 (cs)
[Submitted on 4 May 2026]
Title:Stop Automating Peer Review Without Rigorous Evaluation
Authors:Joachim Baumann, Jiaxin Pei, Sanmi Koyejo, Dirk Hovy
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Abstract:Large language models offer a tempting solution to address the peer review crisis. This position paper argues that today's AI systems should not be used to produce paper reviews. We ground this position in an empirical comparison of human- versus AI-generated ICLR 2026 reviews and an evaluation of the effect of automated paper rewriting on different AI reviewers. We identify two critical issues: 1) AI reviewers exhibit a hivemind effect of excessive agreement within and across papers that reduces perspective diversity. 2) AI review scores are trivially gameable through paper laundering: prompting an LLM to rewrite a paper could significantly increase the scores from AI reviewers, demonstrating that LLM reviewers are easy to game through stylistic changes rather than scientific results. However, non-gameability and review diversity are necessary but not sufficient conditions for automation. We argue that addressing the peer review crisis requires a science of peer review automation -- not general-purpose LLMs deployed without rigorous evaluation.
Comments: Accepted at ICML 2026 (Spotlight)
Subjects:
Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)
Cite as: arXiv:2605.03202 [cs.AI]
(or arXiv:2605.03202v1 [cs.AI] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.03202
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arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
Journal reference: Forty-third International Conference on Machine Learning Position Paper Track (2026)
Submission history
From: Joachim Baumann [view email] [v1] Mon, 4 May 2026 22:41:04 UTC (768 KB)
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