# Compound Deception in Elite Peer Review: A Failure Mode Taxonomy of 100 Fabricated Citations at NeurIPS 2025

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05930 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.05930/

## Key facts

- Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 4 of its 14 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Feb 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Survey of Hallucination in Natural Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03629/) (2022)
- [A Survey on Hallucination in Large Language Models: Principles, Taxonomy, Challenges, and Open Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.05232/) (2023)
- [A Survey of Hallucination in Large Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.05922/) (2023)
- [Large Legal Fictions: Profiling Legal Hallucinations in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01301/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Detecting and Correcting Reference Hallucinations in Commercial LLMs and Deep Research Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.03173/) (2026)
- [SciIntegrity-Bench: A Benchmark for Evaluating Academic Integrity in AI Scientist Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.10246/) (2026)
- [TRACE: Trajectory Reasoning through Adaptive Cross-Step Evidence Aggregation for LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.07054/) (2026)
- [BibTeX Citation Errors in Scientific Publishing Agents: Evaluation and Mitigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.03159/) (2026)
- [Inspectable AI for Science: A Research Object Approach to Generative AI Governance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.11261/) (2026)
- [VERITAS: Towards a General-Purpose Replication Tool for Scientific Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.02931/) (2026)
- [Distributed Denial of Science: How Indirect Data Poisoning of AI Systems Can Industrialize Scientific Fraud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.10712/) (2026)
- [HALLMARK: How to Diagnose LLM Citation Verifiers and When to Deploy Them](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.18360/) (2026)
- [Phantom References: Hallucinated Citations That Survive Peer Review at Top-Tier Conferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.00738/) (2026)
- [Paper Reconstruction Evaluation: Evaluating Presentation and Hallucination in AI-written Papers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.01128/) (2026)
- [sciwrite-lint: Verification Infrastructure for the Age of Science Vibe-Writing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.08501/) (2026)
- [Intelligence Is Not the Bottleneck: Validating an LLM First-Pass Manuscript Score Against Peer-Review Outcomes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.15887/) (2026)
- [The Slop Paradox: How Synthetic Standardization Erodes Clinical Uncertainty and Cross-Modal Alignment in AI-Rewritten Radiology Reports](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.17791/) (2026)
- [Toward Trustworthy Autonomous Science: A Two-Year Community Roadmap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.12113/) (2026)
- [Transect: Retaining Observability for Long-Horizon LLM Agent Evaluations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.08364/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in academic writing workflows, yet they frequently hallucinate by generating citations to sources that do not exist. This study analyzes 100 AI-generated hallucinated citations that appeared in papers accepted by the 2025 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), one of the world's most prestigious AI conferences. Despite review by 3-5 expert researchers per paper, these fabricated citations evaded detection, appearing in 53 published papers (approx. 1% of all accepted papers). We develop a five-category taxonomy that classifies hallucinations by their failure mode: Total Fabrication (66%), Partial Attribute Corruption (27%), Identifier Hijacking (4%), Placeholder Hallucination (2%), and Semantic Hallucination (1%). Our analysis reveals a critical finding: every hallucination (100%) exhibited compound failure modes. The distribution of secondary characteristics was dominated by Semantic Hallucination (63%) and Identifier Hijacking (29%), which often appeared alongside Total Fabrication to create a veneer of plausibility and false verifiability. These compound structures exploit multiple verification heuristics simultaneously, explaining why peer review fails to detect them. The distribution exhibits a bimodal pattern: 92% of contaminated papers contain 1-2 hallucinations (minimal AI use) while 8% contain 4-13 hallucinations (heavy reliance). These findings demonstrate that current peer review processes do not include effective citation verification and that the problem extends beyond NeurIPS to other major conferences, government reports, and professional consulting. We propose mandatory automated citation verification at submission as an implementable solution to prevent fabricated citations from becoming normalized in scientific literature.