_version_ 1866918513352900608
author Kim, Seungone
Yoon, Dongkeun
Gashteovski, Kiril
Suk, Juyoung
Baek, Jinheon
Aggarwal, Pranjal
Wu, Ian
Zaverkin, Viktor
Petkoski, Spase
Schrider, Daniel R.
Dukovski, Ilija
Santini, Francesco
Mitreska, Biljana
Jeong, Yong
Kwon, Kyeongha
Sim, Young Min
Manasova, Dragana
Porto, Arthur
Mojsoska, Biljana
Takamoto, Makoto
Shuntov, Marko
Liu, Ruoqi
Lee, Hyunjoo Jenny
Dinç, Niyazi Ulas
Jo, Yehhyun
Han, Sunkyu
Lee, Chungwoo
Li, Huishan
Tsai, Esther H. R.
Simsek, Ergun
Shafi, Khushboo
Chung, Yeonseung
Park, Jihye
Shulevski, Aleksandar
Christiansen, Henrik
Son, Yoosang
Knight, Elly
Montoya, Amanda
Ahn, Jeongyoun
Langkammer, Christian
Moon, Heera
Yoon, Changwon
Stikov, Nikola
Jang, Mooseok
Choi, Edward
Kim, Junhan
Jung, Yeon Sik
Kim, Woo Youn
Kim, Jae Kyoung
Anjum, Ishraq Md
Kim, Hyun Uk
Bridges, Drew
Lawrence, Carolin
Yue, Xiang
Oh, Alice
Asai, Akari
Welleck, Sean
Neubig, Graham
author_facet Kim, Seungone
Yoon, Dongkeun
Gashteovski, Kiril
Suk, Juyoung
Baek, Jinheon
Aggarwal, Pranjal
Wu, Ian
Zaverkin, Viktor
Petkoski, Spase
Schrider, Daniel R.
Dukovski, Ilija
Santini, Francesco
Mitreska, Biljana
Jeong, Yong
Kwon, Kyeongha
Sim, Young Min
Manasova, Dragana
Porto, Arthur
Mojsoska, Biljana
Takamoto, Makoto
Shuntov, Marko
Liu, Ruoqi
Lee, Hyunjoo Jenny
Dinç, Niyazi Ulas
Jo, Yehhyun
Han, Sunkyu
Lee, Chungwoo
Li, Huishan
Tsai, Esther H. R.
Simsek, Ergun
Shafi, Khushboo
Chung, Yeonseung
Park, Jihye
Shulevski, Aleksandar
Christiansen, Henrik
Son, Yoosang
Knight, Elly
Montoya, Amanda
Ahn, Jeongyoun
Langkammer, Christian
Moon, Heera
Yoon, Changwon
Stikov, Nikola
Jang, Mooseok
Choi, Edward
Kim, Junhan
Jung, Yeon Sik
Kim, Woo Youn
Kim, Jae Kyoung
Anjum, Ishraq Md
Kim, Hyun Uk
Bridges, Drew
Lawrence, Carolin
Yue, Xiang
Oh, Alice
Asai, Akari
Welleck, Sean
Neubig, Graham
contents With the advancement of AI capabilities, AI reviewers are beginning to be deployed in scientific peer review, yet their capability and credibility remain in question: many scientists simply view them as probabilistic systems without the expertise to evaluate research, while other researchers are more optimistic about their readiness without concrete evidence. Understanding what AI reviewers do well, where they fall short, and what challenges remain is essential. However, existing evaluations of AI reviewers have focused on whether their verdicts match human verdicts (e.g., score alignment, acceptance prediction), which is insufficient to characterize their capabilities and limits. In this paper, we close this gap through a large-scale expert annotation study, in which 45 domain scientists in Physical, Biological, and Health Sciences spent 469 hours rating 2,960 individual criticisms (each targeting one specific aspect of a paper) from human-written and AI-generated reviews of 82 Nature-family papers on correctness, significance, and sufficiency of evidence. On a composite of all three dimensions, a reviewing agent powered by GPT-5.2 scores above each paper's top-rated human reviewer (60.0% vs. 48.2%, p = 0.009), while all three AI reviewers (including Gemini 3.0 Pro and Claude Opus 4.5) exceed the lowest-rated human across every dimension. AI reviewers' accurate criticisms are also more often rated significant and well-evidenced, and surface a distinct 26% of issues no human raises. However, AI reviewers overlap far more than humans do (21% vs. 3% for cross-reviewer pairs), and exhibit 16 recurring weaknesses humans do not share, such as limited subfield knowledge, lack of long context management over multiple files, and overly critical stance on minor issues. Overall, our results position current AI reviewers as complements to, not substitutes for, human reviewers.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_20668
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle On the limits and opportunities of AI reviewers: Reviewing the reviews of Nature-family papers with 45 expert scientists
Kim, Seungone
Yoon, Dongkeun
Gashteovski, Kiril
Suk, Juyoung
Baek, Jinheon
Aggarwal, Pranjal
Wu, Ian
Zaverkin, Viktor
Petkoski, Spase
Schrider, Daniel R.
Dukovski, Ilija
Santini, Francesco
Mitreska, Biljana
Jeong, Yong
Kwon, Kyeongha
Sim, Young Min
Manasova, Dragana
Porto, Arthur
Mojsoska, Biljana
Takamoto, Makoto
Shuntov, Marko
Liu, Ruoqi
Lee, Hyunjoo Jenny
Dinç, Niyazi Ulas
Jo, Yehhyun
Han, Sunkyu
Lee, Chungwoo
Li, Huishan
Tsai, Esther H. R.
Simsek, Ergun
Shafi, Khushboo
Chung, Yeonseung
Park, Jihye
Shulevski, Aleksandar
Christiansen, Henrik
Son, Yoosang
Knight, Elly
Montoya, Amanda
Ahn, Jeongyoun
Langkammer, Christian
Moon, Heera
Yoon, Changwon
Stikov, Nikola
Jang, Mooseok
Choi, Edward
Kim, Junhan
Jung, Yeon Sik
Kim, Woo Youn
Kim, Jae Kyoung
Anjum, Ishraq Md
Kim, Hyun Uk
Bridges, Drew
Lawrence, Carolin
Yue, Xiang
Oh, Alice
Asai, Akari
Welleck, Sean
Neubig, Graham
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
With the advancement of AI capabilities, AI reviewers are beginning to be deployed in scientific peer review, yet their capability and credibility remain in question: many scientists simply view them as probabilistic systems without the expertise to evaluate research, while other researchers are more optimistic about their readiness without concrete evidence. Understanding what AI reviewers do well, where they fall short, and what challenges remain is essential. However, existing evaluations of AI reviewers have focused on whether their verdicts match human verdicts (e.g., score alignment, acceptance prediction), which is insufficient to characterize their capabilities and limits. In this paper, we close this gap through a large-scale expert annotation study, in which 45 domain scientists in Physical, Biological, and Health Sciences spent 469 hours rating 2,960 individual criticisms (each targeting one specific aspect of a paper) from human-written and AI-generated reviews of 82 Nature-family papers on correctness, significance, and sufficiency of evidence. On a composite of all three dimensions, a reviewing agent powered by GPT-5.2 scores above each paper's top-rated human reviewer (60.0% vs. 48.2%, p = 0.009), while all three AI reviewers (including Gemini 3.0 Pro and Claude Opus 4.5) exceed the lowest-rated human across every dimension. AI reviewers' accurate criticisms are also more often rated significant and well-evidenced, and surface a distinct 26% of issues no human raises. However, AI reviewers overlap far more than humans do (21% vs. 3% for cross-reviewer pairs), and exhibit 16 recurring weaknesses humans do not share, such as limited subfield knowledge, lack of long context management over multiple files, and overly critical stance on minor issues. Overall, our results position current AI reviewers as complements to, not substitutes for, human reviewers.
title On the limits and opportunities of AI reviewers: Reviewing the reviews of Nature-family papers with 45 expert scientists
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.20668