Hallucinated citations in NeurIPS papers: what broke and how to fix it
Introduction TL;DR: GPTZero reported 100 confirmed fake references across 51 accepted NeurIPS 2025 papers, and the incident spotlights how AI-generated “reference slop” can slip through elite peer review. In the first place, hallucinated citations are not “minor typos”—they break the verifiability chain that science relies on. Why it matters: Citations are the audit trail. If the trail is fabricated, readers can’t reproduce or validate claims. What was found GPTZero said it scanned the full set of accepted NeurIPS papers and confirmed 100 hallucinated citations across 51 papers. Some reports mention a slightly different paper count (e.g., “at least 53”), which typically reflects differences in counting criteria or update timing. ...