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A claim-level novelty check caught 97 percent of disguised papers at a 1.5 percent false-alarm rate and cut an LLM judge's false alarms from 11.8 to 1.5 percent

AspireAI community · arXiv (cs.AI)
ClaimNov is a fine-grained novelty module that judges a research proposal one claim at a time instead of accepting or rejecting the whole thing, built on four datasets of 1,060 proposals assembled from published papers, reviewer disputes and generated ideas the field later published. Its claim-level evidence catches 97 percent of disguised papers at a 1.5 percent false-alarm rate and cuts an LLM judge's false alarms from 11.8 to 1.5 percent, while rejecting only 3 percent of ICLR-accepted proposals whose contribution a reviewer disputed. The paper's own audit found the underlying problem: existing checks that reject a lot of non-novel work also tend to raise false alarms on ideas that human researchers later realize, and a proposal-level check can only point at claim-level prior art by rejecting everything. Code and data are released.
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