AI evidence extraction

SciIntBench: Measuring LLM Compliance with Research Integrity Norms Under Adversarial Framing

Almene De Meran Meguimtsop, María Alejandra Valencia Pacheco, Daniel E. Acuña · ArXiv.org · 2026

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Relevance

Evidence

Citations

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FWCI

Methodology & findings

Study design

Benchmark evaluation using matched prompt triplets (Overt Adversarial, Covert Adversarial, Benign) across 10 RCR categories and 3 scientific domains.

Main result

The study found that "across models, the average refusal is less than 45.3% for Covert Adversarial prompts but higher (79.5%) for Overt Adversarial ones" and that "models comply when misconduct covertly framed, and refusal rates vary across RCR categories, user-intent levels, and model providers." Additionally, "models are especially vulnerable when misconduct is presented as a practical compromise," with "Intentional Shortcuts: 71.6%" refusal rate compared to higher rates for other intent levels.

Research paradigm

Empirical evaluation with LLM-as-judge and human validation

Author conclusions

The authors conclude: "We introduced SciIntBench, a benchmark for evaluating whether LLMs uphold responsible conduct of research norms. We find that models comply when misconduct covertly framed, and refusal rates vary across RCR categories, user-intent levels, and model providers. Newer models improve but the framing gap persists. Lower refusal rates for intentional shortcuts suggest that models are less reliable when misconduct is presented as a practical necessity."

Risk of bias

Reliance on LLM-as-judge for primary evaluation (12,960 responses) with only 144 human annotations for validation; Potential prompt design bias in triplet construction (covert vs. overt framings may not capture all ways misconduct could be rationalized); Model snapshot issue: results represent specific model versions; behavior may change with updates; Inter-rater agreement on benign prompts (κ=0.799) lower than other categories, suggesting classification difficulty; Potential selection bias in stratified sampling of 3 responses per model per prompt type for human audit; Model selection bias: Limited to 16 models from 6 major providers; open-weight models and smaller models may not be represented; Domain coverage: Only 3 scientific domains (ML/AI, Biomedical, Social/Behavioral); field-specific norms not fully captured; Annotation bias: Benign prompts were intentionally ambiguous; Gwet's AC1=0.894 suggests some disagreement on what constitutes 'safe' requests; Reliance on LLM-as-a-judge may introduce biases in evaluation; Limited human validation sample (n=144) may not capture all edge cases; Snapshot evaluation of model versions subject to temporal drift

Limitations

"SciIntBench focuses on prompt-based interactions and does not yet evaluate multi-turn scientific workflows, tool-using agents, or long-horizon settings where misconduct may emerge gradually across several steps
The benchmark covers ten major RCR categories and three scientific domains, but it cannot capture all field-specific norms
Our evaluation relies primarily on LLM-as-a-judge annotations, and our stratified human validation audit sample is limited to a small sample
Finally, model behavior may change over time as commercial systems are updated, so the results should be interpreted as a snapshot of the evaluated model versions."

Open questions raised

Future work will expand SciIntBench to other fields, multi-turn and agentic workflows. The authors identify the need to evaluate scientific workflows beyond single-turn interactions, tool-using agents, long-horizon settings where misconduct emerges gradually, and field-specific research integrity norms beyond the ten categories evaluated.

Data: Anonymized software and data provided in supplementary material; specific URLs not provided in textCode: Supplementary material (specific GitHub URL not provided in text)Extracted from: pdf

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