CABAL: Multi-Agent Simulacra for Tracing the Effects of Collusive Bidding in Peer Review
2026-09-07 12:00Science🔥 42.2 heat score
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CABAL proposes an end-to-end multi-agent simulation framework for studying the impact of collusive bidding on the integrity of review assignments during peer reviews. This framework constructs collusive bidding strategies based on affinity to form collusive loops and select target papers, by using LLM-driven reviewer agents that maintain a fixed conference environment and implement honest or collusive strategies. Controlled experiments show that collusive bidding doubles the capture rate of target papers; the assigned colluders score the target papers about two points higher than honest co-reviewers, while the overall impact on the conference is relatively limited. Additionally, there is limited evidence from existing bidding phase detectors: in stress tests with fixed triple-set detectors, native positive bidding graphs are susceptible to benign affinity confusion, and only the “very high” diagnostic view achieves accurate but low-coverage local recovery.