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zulbantoday at 5:24 PM5 repliesview on HN

Generally, published papers don't give a damn about reproducibility. I've seen it identified as a crisis by many. Publishers, reviewers, and researchers mostly don't care about that level of basic rigor. There's no professional repercussions or embarrassment.

Agreed - if I was a reviewer for LLM papers it would be an instant rejection not listing the versions and prompts used.


Replies

epistasistoday at 5:44 PM

I'm not so sure of that opinion on reproducibility. The last peer review I did was for a small journal that explicitly does not evaluate for high scientific significance, merely for correctness, which generally means straightforward acceptance. The other two reviews were positive, as was mine, except I said that the methods need to be described more and ideally the code placed somewhere. That was enough for a complete rejection of the paper, without asking for the simple revisions I requested. It was a very serious action taken merely because I requested better reproducibility!

(Personally I think the lack of reproducibility comes back mostly to peer reviewers that haven't thought through enough about the steps they'd need to take to reproduce, and instead focus on the results...)

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bjournetoday at 9:52 PM

The comment is wrong -- model versions are clearly specified in the supplement.

inetknghttoday at 7:20 PM

> Generally, published papers don't give a damn about reproducibility

While this is sadly true, it's especially true when talking about things that are stochastic in nature.

LLMs outputs, for example, are notoriously unreproducible.

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ghywertellingtoday at 6:43 PM

The same about surveys and polls. I know no one who has ever been polled or surveyed. When will we stop this fascination with made up infographics crisis?

KellyCriteriontoday at 5:50 PM

Do they reproduce any submitted papers at all?

Does this happen?

I can remember this room-temperature-super-conductor guy whose experiments where replicated, but this seems rare?

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