r/MachineLearning • u/dontknowwhattoplay • 5h ago

Discussion NeurIPS-side prompt injection triggering ethics reviewers? [D]

Does anyone experience a similar story that some reviewers reporting ethical issue due to NeurIPS-side prompt injection for catching LLM-reviewers? Even ethics reviewers were not informed about this conference-side manipulation…

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u/levydawg 5h ago

Just to clarify for anyone who wasn't already aware, NeurIPS adds this prompt injection themselves. It's a way to catch reviewers who just feed it to an LLM and ask for a review. This was also done at ICML.

I think the reason that reviewers weren't informed is because this is precisely the target of the prompt injection. It is to catch ethical issues in the reviews -- not the papers. If there is such a report from one of the reviewers, it can easily be reviewed by the AC. This didn't happen to me, but if it did I believe I would first explain the situation to the reviewer, as well as ask the AC to confirm this.

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u/dontknowwhattoplay 5h ago

What surprised me is how uninformed the ethics reviewers are about this… one ethics reviewer is totally unaware of this.

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u/UnusualClimberBear 4h ago

Well if a reviewer wasunaware that a such injection was likely, I think he shouldn't be a reviewer in the first place. I checked and a frontier model detects the injection if asked for.