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DeepReview: Improving LLM-based Paper Review with Human-like Deep Thinking Process

Paper · 2025 · Minjun Zhu, Yixuan Weng, Linyi Yang et al.

Summary

Automated paper reviewing with LLMs often produces shallow critiques. It lacks evidence, is easily swayed by manipulative prompts, and suffers from limited domain knowledge and hallucination. The authors argue that part of the cause is that open review corpora mostly contain final reviews and scores, not the reasoning that produced them. They propose DeepReview, a staged framework that imitates how an expert works. First it checks novelty by generating questions, retrieving related literature and reranking it. Next it simulates several reviewers along multiple dimensions. It then verifies each criticism against evidence in the paper and finally composes a meta-review with scores. A synthesis pipeline built this way over ICLR 2024–2025 submissions yields the DeepReview-13K training set and the DeepReview-Bench test set. On this data they fine-tune DeepReviewer-14B, which offers Fast, Standard and Best inference modes that trade compute for depth. The model beats much larger systems on rating prediction, ranking and accept/reject selection. It also holds up reasonably well against adversarial manipulation without dedicated training. All artifacts are released openly, which gives the community a reusable benchmark for assisted peer review.

Key points

  • Data:
    • The authors gathered 18,976 ICLR submissions from OpenReview and arXiv and converted them to Markdown with MinerU, preferring LaTeX sources where available.
    • DeepReview-13K holds 13,378 training papers (4,131 from ICLR 2024 and 9,247 from ICLR 2025).
    • DeepReview-Bench holds 1,286 test papers.
  • Models: DeepReviewer-14B (plus a 7B variant) outperforms CycleReviewer-70B while generating fewer output tokens, even in Fast mode.
  • Win rates: In LLM-as-a-judge comparisons, the Best mode wins 88.21% of the time against GPT-o1 and 80.20% against DeepSeek-R1.
  • Quantitative gains over baselines:
    • Rating MSE improves by about 44.80%.
    • Rating Spearman correlation improves by 6.04%.
    • Selection accuracy improves by 1.80%.
  • Limitations:
    • The training data is synthetic.
    • Best mode, which uses retrieval and the full reasoning chain, is costly to run.
    • Resistance to adversarial attacks is only partial.
    • The authors position the tool as reviewer assistance, not a replacement for human reviewers.

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

 Fields, topics and concepts

Cite

Cite as Minjun Zhu, Yixuan Weng, Linyi Yang and Yue Zhang. 2025. DeepReview: Improving LLM-based Paper Review with Human-like Deep Thinking Process. arXiv:2503.08569.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.48550/arxiv.2503.08569 · arXiv 2503.08569

@misc{zhu2025deepreview,
  title = {{DeepReview: Improving LLM-based Paper Review with Human-like Deep Thinking Process}},
  author = {Minjun Zhu, Yixuan Weng, Linyi Yang and Yue Zhang},
  year = {2025},
  doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2503.08569},
  eprint = {2503.08569},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2503.08569}
}

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