Program misleading high school students into paying to perform academic misconduct in ML Research [D]

I was browsing OpenReview and I came accross this person called Kevin Zhu [https://openreview.net/profile?id=\~Kevin\_Zhu3](https://openreview.net/profile?id=~Kevin_Zhu3), lets say I was impressed when I saw 158 publications and 468 coauthors, and out of curiosity I searched up his afflication ([https://algoverseairesearch.org/](https://algoverseairesearch.org/)) Turns out it is a paid program, and most interesting it is marketed towards **high school students.** They have a whole column of papers listed as **Neurips publications** (their website states: 289 Algoverse Students Accepted to NeurIPS 2025). I was originally unware of the rigor of Neurips workshops and I was understandably very shocked. I skimmed through four of their papers one by one. Every single one had errors that would be caught by opening the PDF and reading it once. I am completely unsure how they are not caught by reviewers even at a workshop. [https://openreview.net/forum?id=21pxWVRoPL](https://openreview.net/forum?id=21pxWVRoPL) \- Appendix Tables 6.5 and 6.6 are supposed to report two different experimental conditions: "Stigma Negative" and "Stigma Positive." One measures what happens when the user pushes the model toward a negative association with a stigmatized group. The other measures the opposite direction. These are fundamentally different experiments, yet they have the exact same numbers in the results. There are typo in the Abstract section, their Related Works is within Results section. Citations are completely wrong, which I suspect to be AI generated. [https://openreview.net/pdf?id=0BYRYwGCbK](https://openreview.net/pdf?id=0BYRYwGCbK) \- 711 broken prompts in a dataset that claims human review. The results say the opposite of the abstract. The abstract claims the work "reveals novel methods to elicit sycophancy." Then they proceed to show most modifiers perform about the same as the unmodified control (91-95% accuracy). Moreover, their citations also seem AI generated with false citations (wrong authors, wrong formats ..) Interestingly, **undisclosed self-citation by Kevin Zhu.** [https://openreview.net/pdf?id=VcRUAT5G8I](https://openreview.net/pdf?id=VcRUAT5G8I) \- Two foundational methods are attributed to the wrong paper. TIES merging and Task Arithmetic, two well known methods, was introduced but never cited. Same AI generated citations, I am not even going to get to the content anymore. [https://openreview.net/pdf?id=It7AgR3A9H](https://openreview.net/pdf?id=It7AgR3A9H) \- eleven authors, zero contribution. Four papers, that I RANDOMLY CLICKED ON WITH NO ORDER, all follow the same template take existing method -> run it with some variation, likely done by AI -> put Kevin Zhu as an author -> submit to workshop I am unsure how any of these bypass any form of peer review process, only today I learned how low the bar is for workshops. **Why I am posting:** It angers to me when you market this to high schoolers and tell them you can get into Stanford and MIT. A 16 year old look at this and say, if I pay $3,325, I can get a Neurip publication. Then they proceed to let them publish a paper clear errors. This is academic dishonesty, but I dont think the kids even know they are commiting it. **Kevin Zhu** puts his name on every single paper published, self-cite himself in these paper, and charge student $3,325. I wasn't fully aware of how much lighter the workshop review process is, and I really want to hear why this is.