Four LLMs reviewed 200 papers that had already passed peer review, and 75.6% called for major revision or rejection
AspireAI community · arXiv
A study took 200 articles published in 2026 under CC BY 4.0 licenses across 20 general-science, life-science and clinical-medicine journals including Nature, Science and Cell, and asked four current language models, two proprietary and two open-weight, to write independent peer-review reports of each under a blinded protocol. The verdicts were harsh and inconsistent: 605 of 800 reviews, or 75.6%, recommended major revision or rejection, but the rate at which any single model did so ranged from 17.5% to 100%. When the same manuscripts were seeded with one deliberately planted methodological or statistical flaw, detection rates ran from 17.0% to 60.5%. The practical implication is that LLM peer reviewers are simultaneously low-specificity and low-sensitivity here, so their output should be read as a framing-dependent signal rather than an editorial judgment; the study covers one year of papers and four models, and it does not evaluate whether these models help a human reviewer in practice.
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Two sparse-autoencoder analyses have resisted scaling: matching semantically similar features across layers, and compressing large feature circuits into interpretable supernodes. This paper argues both are the same underlying problem, estimating semantic distances between SAE features that sit on different activation manifolds. Its representation treats each feature not as a single decoder vector but as an activation-weighted distribution over the hidden states expressing it, projects those distributions into a shared reference space, and compares them with Wasserstein distance. The representation is proved invariant to activation rescaling and stable under perturbation, and recovers true matches under finite-sample margin conditions. Empirically it outperformed decoder-vector and LLM-based baselines and captured subtle functional distinctions between related features, and it compressed large feature circuits into interpretable supernodes automatically. The limitation is that this is interpretability tooling: the paper demonstrates better feature matching and circuit compression, not that downstream interpretability claims become more accurate.