Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

Is the baseline assumption of this work that an erroneous citation is LLM hallucinated?

Did they run the checker across a body of papers before LLMs were available and verify that there were no citations in peer reviewed papers that got authors or titles wrong?

People will commonly hold LLMs as unusable because they make mistakes. So do people. Books have errors. Papers have errors. People have flawed knowledge, often degraded through a conceptual game of telephone.

Exactly as you said, do precisely this to pre-LLM works. There will be an enormous number of errors with utter certainty.

People keep imperfect notes. People are lazy. People sometimes even fabricate. None of this needed LLMs to happen.

Under what circumstances would a human mistakenly cite a paper which does not exist? I’m having difficulty imagining how someone could mistakenly do that.