Abstract
Dual submissions, where identical or substantially similar papers are submitted to one or more archival venues without cross-citation or disclosure, have become a growing concern for the AAAI Conference and other scientific publication venues. These submissions increase the burden on the peer-review system and pollute the scientific record.
As part of the AAAI-26 review process, we (conference organizers) compared AAAI main-track submissions with nine other archival venues that had overlapping review periods. We also searched for dual submissions within the AAAI-26 main track. We employed a title+abstract similarity assessment to prioritize highly similar paper pairs for subsequent triage by an LLM-based overlap assessment tool, followed by manual review of the highest severity pairs. This manual review led to the desk-rejection of 141 AAAI-26 main-track submissions.
We aim to alert future organizers and the broader artificial intelligence research community to the significant increase in dual submissions. The incidence of exact duplicate submissions, which are easy to detect, has been eclipsed by the number of papers that use different words to describe the same contribution, which are extremely time-consuming to detect. The growth of this phenomenon is likely facilitated by increasing access to generative AI tools.
We include several recommendations for addressing this challenge:
- Update the AAAI Multiple Submission Policy and educate the community about acceptable practices;
- Implement dual-submission checking tools before submission closes;
- Work across venues to converge on consistent policies and penalties to help reduce the incidence of dual submission;
- Create a community-driven adversarial challenge to accelerate the development of robust detection tools.
Blogger's Review: The rapid growth of dual submissions in recent years not only increases the burden on reviews but also impacts the overall quality of scientific research. By adopting advanced detection tools and enhancing community education, we can effectively tackle this challenge. I hope AAAI will lead the scientific publishing community in this area of improvement.