AAAI-26 Dual Submissions: Novel Challenges

Dual submissions, in which identical or substantially similar papers are simultaneously submitted to one or more archival venues, without cross-citation or disclosure, are a growing problem for the AAAI Conference and other scientific publication venues. These submissions increase the burden on the peer-review system and pollute the scientific record. As part of the AAAI-26 review process, we (conference organizers) compared AAAI main-track submissions to nine other archival venues with overlapping review periods. We also searched for dual submissions within the AAAI-26 main track. We employed title+abstract similarity assessment to prioritize highly similar paper pairs for subsequent triage by an LLM-based overlap assessment tool, followed by manual review of the highest severity pairs. Manual review of such pairs led to the desk-rejection of 141 AAAI-26 main-track submissions. We seek to alert future organizers, and the broader artificial intelligence research community, to the enormous growth in dual submissions. The incidence of exact duplicate submissions, which are easy to detect, has been eclipsed by the number of papers that use different words to describe the same contribution, which are extremely time-consuming to detect. The growth in this phenomenon is likely facilitated by increasing access to generative AI tools. We include several recommendations for addressing this challenge, including (1) updating the AAAI Multiple Submission Policy and educating the community about acceptable practice, (2) having dual-submission checking tools in place before submissions close, (3) working across venues to converge on consistent policies and penalties to aid in reducing the incidence of dual submission, and (4) creating a community-driven adversarial challenge to accelerate the development of robust detection tools.

Gaming AI-Assisted Peer Reviews Poses New Risks to the Scientific Community

AI is increasingly used to support scientific peer review, from manuscript screening, reviewer assistance to editorial triage. Although such systems promise to reduce reviewer burden and accelerate publication, their robustness to strategic manipulation remains poorly understood. Here we show that AI-mediated peer review is vulnerable to a simple, low-cost manipulation: superficial rephrasing of the manuscript abstract. Without changing the underlying scientific content and communication, and even without knowledge of the reviewing model, adversarially rewritten abstracts substantially improve AI review outcomes. We see this across disciplines and publication venues, for both human-written and AI-generated papers. Our strongest attack achieves an attack-success-rate of about 38%, increasing acceptance ratings by +1.31 for Gemini 3 Flash reviewers and by +0.88 for GPT 5.4 Mini reviewers on a 10-point scale. When the original AI review suggests 'reject', the success rate rises to more than 50%. This effect extends beyond overall score inflation, increasing review confidence and scores on core scientific criteria such as soundness, significance and perceived contribution. The attack is practical, requiring only about 5 minutes and $1 for a 10-page AI conference submission, and is hard to distinguish from ordinary scientific editing. Inflated AI reviews could bias downstream human decision-making, shifting editorial recommendations from rejection towards acceptance. These findings reveal a general vulnerability in AI-assisted scientific evaluation: when AI-generated review influence editorial decisions, authors may be incentivized to optimize manuscripts for AI judgment rather than scientific merit. Our results suggest that AI tools should not be treated as neutral evaluators in high-stakes peer review without systematic robustness testing, transparent safeguards and careful human oversight.