Tools: Neurips 2025's Hallucinated Citations: How 100+ Fake References...

Posted on Feb 10

• Originally published at coreprose.com

In 2025, NeurIPS – the world’s flagship machine learning conference – quietly crossed a new frontier in AI risk: its own proceedings.

After the conference, GPTZero scanned 4,841 accepted papers and uncovered hundreds of hallucinated citations that had survived peer review, live presentation, and publication. At least 100 hallucinations across 51–53 papers were confirmed.

These were not fringe submissions. Teams from Google, Harvard, Meta, and the University of Cambridge all had papers implicated, marking the first documented case of hallucinated citations entering the final record of a major AI venue.

With an acceptance rate of 24.52%, every flawed paper had beaten more than 15,000 rejected submissions, yet still cited research that does not exist. This is more than an embarrassment; it exposes a structural weakness in how AI research is produced and vetted.

GPTZero’s Hallucination Check tool flagged “100s of hallucinated citations” in the 4,841 accepted NeurIPS 2025 papers, then manually validated 100 of them across just over 50 papers.

Despite each paper receiving three or more reviews, hallucinations passed through submission, review, and publication. Given NeurIPS’s role in shaping research agendas, hiring, and funding, even a 1% contamination rate can distort the field for years.

GPTZero’s analysis shows hallucinations arise through multiple patterns that are hard to catch under time pressure.

GPTZero estimates roughly half of the NeurIPS papers with hallucinated citations showed strong signs of AI-generated drafting or heavy AI assistance. When:

In this environment, bibliographic fabrication becomes effectively invisible until it enters the literature.

Source: Dev.to