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.

this brings us to a cultural divide, westerners would see this as a personal scar, as they consider the integrity of the publishing sphere at large to be held up by the integrity of individuals

i clicked on 4 of those papers, and the pattern i saw was middle-eastern, indian, and chinese names

these are cultures where they think this kind of behavior is actually acceptable, they would assume it's the fault of the journal for accepting the paper. they don't see the loss of reputation to be a personal scar because they instead attribute blame to the game.

some people would say it's racist to understand this, but in my opinion when i was working with people from these cultures there was just no other way to learn to cooperate with them than to understand them, it's an incredibly confusing experience to be working with them until you understand the various differences between your own culture and theirs

im not sure if you are gonna get downvoted so im sticking a limb out to cop any potential collateral damage in the name of finding out whether the common inhabitant of this forum considers the idea of low trust vs high trust societies to be inherently racist