用智能体模拟评审竞标串通,揭示其对论文分配的真实影响。
CABAL: Multi-Agent Simulacra for Tracing the Effects of Collusive Bidding in Peer Review

- 构建多智能体仿真框架,让大模型扮演诚实或串通的审稿人。
- 串通竞标使目标论文被分配的概率翻倍,评分高出约2分。
- 适合关注学术评审公正性的研究人员和会议组织者。
AAAI-27审稿周期中曝光的审稿人串通竞标风险凸显了现有研究将竞标、分配与评审操纵割裂处理的局限。真实世界分析受限于串通意图不可见及缺乏可比反事实场景。为此,我们提出 extsc{CABAL},一个在固定会议环境下运行的端到端多智能体仿真框架,通过配置具备诚实或串通策略的LLM驱动审稿人智能体,研究评审分配完整性。我们进一步设计了一种基于审稿人-论文亲和力的引导型串通竞标策略,构建合作圈并选择目标论文,实现符合专业背景而非随意攻击的串通。受控实验表明,串通竞标使目标论文被分配的概率超过两倍,且串通审稿人对目标论文的评分比诚实同行高约2分,而整体会议影响相对有限。评估的竞标阶段检测器仅提供有限证据:在固定三元组检测器压力测试中,原始正向竞标图受良性亲和力干扰;而仅看极高值的诊断视图虽可精准定位局部串通,但覆盖范围小。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Recent reports during the AAAI-27 review cycle highlight the risk of reviewers coordinating bids for reciprocal assignment advantage. Prior work treats bidding, reviewer assignment, and review manipulation as separate stages, leaving the lifecycle effects of collusive bidding unclear. Real-world analysis is further constrained by typically unobservable collusive intent and the lack of counterfactuals for the same conference. Motivated by this gap, we introduce \alg, an end-to-end multi-agent simulacra framework for studying reviewer assignment integrity by holding the conference environment fixed and configuring LLM-driven reviewer agents with honest or collusive policies. We further develop an affinity-guided collusive bidding strategy that uses mutual reviewer-paper affinities to construct collusion rings and select target papers, producing expertise-consistent rather than arbitrarily targeted attacks. Controlled experiments show that collusive bidding more than doubles target-paper capture and that assigned colluders score target papers about two points higher than honest co-reviewers, while conference-wide effects remain comparatively modest. Evaluated bid-phase detectors provide only limited evidence of collusion: in a fixed-triplet detector stress test, native positive-bid graphs are confounded by benign affinity, while a Very-High-only diagnostic view enables precise but low-coverage local recovery.
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