Updated practice for review articles and position papers in ArXiv CS category

What would be the point of blaming LLMs? What would that accomplish? What does it even mean to blame LLMs?

LLMs are not submitting these papers on their own, people are. As far as I'm concerned, whatever blame exists rests on those people and the system that rewards them.

Right, good clarification.

If you believe that, can you demonstrate how to generate a position or review paper using an LLM?

So what? People are experimenting with novel tools for review and publication. These restrictions are dumb, people can just ignore reviews and position papers if they start proving to be less useful, and the good ones will eventually spread through word of mouth, just like arxiv has always worked.

I don't think being closed vs open is the problem because most of the open access journals will ask for thousands of dollars from authors as publication fees. Which is getting paid to them by public funding. The open access model is actually now a lucrative model for the publishers. And they still don't pay authors or reviewers.

Might as well ask about a list of spam email addresses.

why train LLMs on preprint inaccurate findings?

google internally started working on "indexing" patent applications, materials science publications, and new computer science applications, more than 10 years ago. You the consumer / casual are starting to see the services now in a rush to consumer product placement. You must know very well that major mil around the world are racing to "index" comms intel and field data; major finance are racing to "index" transactions and build deeper profiles of many kinds. You as an Internet user are being profiled by a dozen new smaller players. arxiv is one small part of a very large sea change right now

The problem with an endorsement scheme is citation rings, ie groups of people who artificially inflate the perceived value of some line of work by citing each other. This is a problem even now, but it is kept in check by the fact that authors do not usually have any control over who reviews their paper. Indeed, in my area, reviews are double blind, and despite claims that “you can tell who wrote this anyway” research done by several chairs in our SIG suggests that this is very much not the case.

Fundamentally, we want research that offers something new (“what did we learn?”) and presents it in a way that at least plausibly has a chance of becoming generalizable knowledge. You call it gate-keeping, but I call it keeping published science high-quality.

An endorsement system would have to be finer grained than a whole article. Mark specific sections that you agree or disagree with, along with comments.

web-of-trust systems seldom scale

What prevents you from creating an island of fake endorsers?

I think it’s lovely that at the time of my reply, everyone seems to be taking your comment at face value instead of for the meta-commentary on “people upvoting content” you’re making by comparing HN karma to endorsement of papers via PGP signatures.

I would be much happer if you explained your _reasons_ for disagreeing or your _reasons_ for agreeing.

I don't think publishing a PGP key with your work does anything. There's no problem identifying the author of the work. The problem is identifying _untrustworthy_ authors. Especially in the face of many other participants in the system claiming the work is trusted.

As I understand it, the current system (in some fields) is essentially to set up a bunch of sockpuppet accounts to cite the main account and publish (useless) derivative works using the ideas from the main account. Someone attempting to use existing reasearch for it's intended purpose has no idea that the whole method is garbage / flawed / not reproducible.

If you can only trust what you, yourself verify, then the publications aren't nearly as useful and it is hard to "stand on the shoulders of giants" to make progress.

Ignoring the actual proposal or user, just looking at karma is probably a pretty terrible metric. High karma accounts tend to just interact more frequently, for long periods of time. Often with less nuanced takes, that just play into what is likely to be popular within a thread. Having a Userscript that just places the karma and comment count next to a username is pretty eye opening.

You can’t get an arXiv account without a referral anyway.

Edit: For clarification I’m agreeing with OP

Of course we already have a system that does this: journals and conferences. They’re peer-reviewed venues for showing the world your work.

I'm guessing this is why they are mandating that submitted position or review papers get published in a journal first.

Keep in mind the fabulous mathematical research of people like Perelman [1], and one might even count Grothendieck [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigori_Perelman [2] https://www.ams.org/notices/200808/tx080800930p.pdf

Maybe there should be some type of strike rules. Say 3 bad articles from any institution and they get 10 year ban. Whatever their prestige or monetary value is. You let people under your name to release bad articles you are out for a while.

Treat everyone equally. After 10 years of only quality you get chance to get back. Before that though luck.

all non-ivy league researchers? that seems a little harsh IMO. i've read some amazing papers from T50 or even some T100 universities.

Ahh, your colleague wants a higher concentration of "that comet might be an interstellar spacecraft" articles.

They've also been putting their names on their grad students' work for eternity as well. It's not like the person whose name is at the top actually writes the paper.

I don't know about CS, but in mathematics the vast majority of researchers would not have enough funding to pay for a good quality full review of their articles. The peer review system mostly runs on good will.

No, the post is definitely complaining about articles written by LLMs:

"In the past few years, arXiv has been flooded with papers. Generative AI / large language models have added to this flood by making papers – especially papers not introducing new research results – fast and easy to write."

"Fast forward to present day – submissions to arXiv in general have risen dramatically, and we now receive hundreds of review articles every month. The advent of large language models have made this type of content relatively easy to churn out on demand, and the majority of the review articles we receive are little more than annotated bibliographies, with no substantial discussion of open research issues."

Surely a lot of them are also about LLMs: LLMs are the hot computing topic and where all the money and attention is, and they're also used heavily in the field. So that could at least partially account for why this policy is for CS papers only, but the announcement's rationale is about LLMs as producing the papers, not as their subject.

Almost all CS papers can still be uploaded, and all non-CS papers. This is a very conservative step by them.

That’s viXra

> but carries no journalistic prestige

Beyond hosting cost, there is some prestige to seeing an arXiv link versus rando blog post despite both having about the same hurdle to publishing.

This isn’t the case in some other fields.

Because a large number of "preprints" that are really blog posts or advertisements for startup greatly increase the noise.

The idea is the site is for academic preprints. Academia has a long history of circulating preprints or manuscripts before the work is finished. There are many reasons for this, the primary one is that scientific and mathematical papers are often in the works for years before they get officially published. Preprints allow other academics in the know to be up to date on current results.

If the service is used heavily by non-academics to lend an aura of credibility to any kind of white paper then the service is less usable for its intended purpose.

It's similar to the use of question/answer sites like Quora to write blog posts and ads under questions like "Why is Foobar brand soap the right soap for your family?"

Yup, 100% going on a linked in profile

Ultimately, a key reason to write these papers in the first place is to guide practitioners in the field, right? Otherwise science itself is just a big (redacted term that can get people shadow-banned for simply using it).

As one of those practitioners, I've found good review/survey papers to be incredibly valuable. They call my attention to the important publications and provide at least a basic timeline that helps me understand how the field has evolved from the beginning and what aspects people are focusing on now.

At the same time, I'll confess that I don't really see why most such papers couldn't be written by LLMs. Ideally by better LLMs than we have now, of course, but that could go without saying.

Are review papers centred on novel research? I get what you mean ofc but most are really mundane overviews. In good review papers the authors offer novel interpretations/directions but even then it involves a lot of grunt work too.

Ok I take your point. However, it is possible to generate a middling review paper combining ai generated slop and edits. Maybe we would be tricked by it in certain circumstances. I don't mean to imply these outputs are something I would value reading. I am just arguing in favour of the proposed approach of arXiv.