Vishisht Rao

Vishisht Rao, Aounon Kumar, Himabindu Lakkaraju et al.

The integrity of peer review is fundamental to scientific progress, but the rise of large language models (LLMs) has introduced concerns that some reviewers may rely on these tools to generate reviews rather than writing them independently. Although some venues have banned LLM-assisted reviewing, enforcement remains difficult as existing detection tools cannot reliably distinguish between fully generated reviews and those merely polished with AI assistance. In this work, we address the challenge of detecting LLM-generated reviews. We consider the approach of performing indirect prompt injection via the paper's PDF, prompting the LLM to embed a covert watermark in the generated review, and subsequently testing for presence of the watermark in the review. We identify and address several pitfalls in naïve implementations of this approach. Our primary contribution is a rigorous watermarking and detection framework that offers strong statistical guarantees. Specifically, we introduce watermarking schemes and hypothesis tests that control the family-wise error rate across multiple reviews, achieving higher statistical power than standard corrections such as Bonferroni, while making no assumptions about the nature of human-written reviews. We explore multiple indirect prompt injection strategies--including font-based embedding and obfuscated prompts--and evaluate their effectiveness under various reviewer defense scenarios. Our experiments find high success rates in watermark embedding across various LLMs. We also empirically find that our approach is resilient to common reviewer defenses, and that the bounds on error rates in our statistical tests hold in practice. In contrast, we find that Bonferroni-style corrections are too conservative to be useful in this setting.

Sarina Xi, Vishisht Rao, Justin Payan et al.

The identification and localization of errors is a core task in peer review, yet the exponential growth of scientific output has made it increasingly difficult for human reviewers to reliably detect errors given the limited pool of experts. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have sparked interest in their potential to support such evaluation tasks, from academic peer review to automated scientific assessment. However, despite the growing use of LLMs in review systems, their capabilities to pinpoint errors remain underexplored. In this work, we introduce Fault Localization Across Writing in Science (FLAWS), an automated benchmark consisting of 713 paper-error pairs designed to evaluate how effectively LLMs detect errors that undermine key claims in research papers. We construct the benchmark by systematically inserting claim-invalidating errors into peer-reviewed papers using LLMs, paired with an automated evaluation metric that measures whether models can identify and localize these errors. Developing such a benchmark presents unique challenges that we overcome: ensuring that the inserted errors are well-defined, challenging, and relevant to the content of the paper, avoiding artifacts that would make identification trivial, and designing a scalable, automated evaluation metric. On the resulting benchmark, we evaluate five frontier LLMs: Claude Sonnet 4.5, DeepSeek Reasoner v3.1, Gemini 2.5 Pro, GPT 5, and Grok 4. Among these, GPT 5 is the top-performing model, achieving 39.1% identification accuracy when k=10, where k is the number of top-ranked error text candidates generated by the LLM.