Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions

Surely this is gross professional misconduct? If one of my postdocs did this they would be at risk of being fired. I would certainly never trust them again. If I let it get through, I should be at risk.

As a reviewer, if I see the authors lie in this way why should I trust anything else in the paper? The only ethical move is to reject immediately.

I acknowledge mistakes and so on are common but this is different league bad behaviour.

Isn't this mostly a set of citation typos? To me this mostly calls for better bibtex checking, writing and checking bibtex is super annoying

Forgetting authors, misspelling them or the journals, putting a wrong digit etc... could be citation typos. I don't see how you add 5 non-existing authors and put a different—but conceptually plausible—journal in the bibtex.

Besides, I would think most people are using bibliographic managers like Zotero&co..., which will pull metadata through DOIs or such.

The errors look a lot more like what happens when you ask an LLM for some sources on xyz.