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home / papers / 2026 / Position: Academic Conferences are Potentially Facing Denominator Gaming Caused by Fully Automated Scientific Agents

Position: Academic Conferences are Potentially Facing Denominator Gaming Caused by Fully Automated Scientific Agents

Paper · 2026 · Rong Shan, Te Gao, Hang Zheng et al.

Summary

This position paper, presented at ICML 2026, describes a vulnerability the authors call Agentic Conference Denominator Gaming. Top AI venues tend to keep acceptance rates roughly constant even as submissions grow. An attacker could therefore use AI agents to flood a conference with cheap, plausible-looking but deliberately weak manuscripts. These decoys are meant to be rejected. Their purpose is to enlarge the submission pool, which raises the number of acceptance slots and pushes the cutoff lower, so a small set of targeted human-written papers becomes more likely to get in.

The authors support the threat with acceptance-rate statistics for 2021–2025 and a sketch of a two-agent proof-of-concept pipeline. They also discuss wider harms: the cost gap between attackers and defenders, reviewer burnout and fully automated "agent mills." They then weigh technical, policy and systemic defenses. Their central claim is that AI-text detectors alone cannot solve the problem. Lasting protection requires structural changes, especially decoupling the number of acceptances from the number of submissions.

Key points

  • Submission growth: NeurIPS went from roughly 6,700 submissions in 2019 to more than 30,000 in 2025, about 29% compound annual growth. Over the same period, acceptance rates at venues such as CVPR, NeurIPS and EMNLP stayed between 20% and 30%.
  • Acceptance-rate stability: For 2021–2025, the standard deviation of acceptance rates was below 1 at several conferences, including NeurIPS (0.53), ACL (0.60), SIGIR (0.83) and ECCV (0.33).
  • Low attack cost: Frameworks such as The AI Scientist are cited as producing complete papers for about $15 each.
  • Proof-of-concept design: The sketched pipeline splits the work between two agents, one that generates content and one that handles submission logistics.
  • Proposed defenses:
    • A fixed range for the number of accepted papers, set independently of submission volume.
    • Author reputation systems modeled on arXiv endorsement.
    • Multi-stage review in the style of AAAI.
    • Submission fees.
    • Stronger identity checks on platforms such as OpenReview, for example ORCID verification and rate limits.
    • The authors argue that pre-screening and AI-text detection are unreliable and can be evaded.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓Carnegie Mellon UniversityPittsburgh · United States633 works · 195,218 citations🎓Shanghai Jiao Tong UniversityShanghai · China232 works · 20,305 citations🎓Central South UniversityChangsha · China24 works · 657 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 6The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 19,503 worksSocial Sciences · 2,009 worksInformation Systems · 1,888 worksSafety Research · 665 worksDecision Sciences · 306 worksInformation Systems and Management · 96 works

Cite

Cite as Rong Shan, Te Gao, Hang Zheng, Yunjia Xi, Jiachen Zhu, Zeyu Zheng, Yong Yu, Weinan Zhang and Jianghao Lin. 2026. Position: Academic Conferences are Potentially Facing Denominator Gaming Caused by Fully Automated Scientific Agents. arXiv:2605.09915.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.48550/arxiv.2605.09915 · arXiv 2605.09915

@misc{shan2026position,
  title = {{Position: Academic Conferences are Potentially Facing Denominator Gaming Caused by Fully Automated Scientific Agents}},
  author = {Rong Shan, Te Gao, Hang Zheng, Yunjia Xi, Jiachen Zhu, Zeyu Zheng, Yong Yu, Weinan Zhang and Jianghao Lin},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2605.09915},
  eprint = {2605.09915},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2605.09915}
}

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