AI-Assisted Peer Review at Scale: The AAAI-26 AI Review Pilot

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence [Submitted on 15 Apr 2026] AI-Assisted Peer Review at Scale: The AAAI-26 AI Review Pilot Joydeep Biswas, Sheila Schoepp, Gautham Vasan, Anthony Opipari, Arthur Zhang, Zichao Hu, Sebastian Joseph, Matthew Lease, Junyi Jessy Li, Peter Stone, Kiri L. Wagstaff, Matthew E. Taylor, Odest Chadwicke Jenkins Scientific peer review faces mounting strain as submission volumes surge, making it increasingly difficult to sustain review quality, consistency, and timeliness. Recent advances in AI have led the community to consider its use in peer review, yet a key unresolved question is whether AI can generate technically sound reviews at real-world conference scale. Here we report the first large-scale field deployment of AI-assisted peer review: every main-track submission at AAAI-26 received one clearly identified AI review from a state-of-the-art system. The system combined frontier models, tool use, and safeguards in a multi-stage process to generate reviews for all 22,977 full-review papers in less than a day. A large-scale survey of AAAI-26 authors and program committee members showed that participants not only found AI reviews useful, but actually preferred them to human reviews on key dimensions such as technical accuracy and research suggestions. We also introduce a novel benchmark and find that our system substantially outperforms a simple LLM-generated review baseline at detecting a variety of scientific weaknesses. Together, these results show that state-of-the-art AI methods can already make meaningful contributions to scientific peer review at conference scale, opening a path toward the next generation of synergistic human-AI teaming for evaluating research. Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) Cite as: arXiv:2604.13940 [cs.AI]   (or arXiv:2604.13940v1 [cs.AI] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.13940 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Joydeep Biswas [view email] [v1] Wed, 15 Apr 2026 14:51:07 UTC (265 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-04 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)