METRO: Towards Strategy Induction from Expert Dialogue Transcripts for Non-collaborative Dialogues

Developing non-collaborative dialogue agents traditionally requires the manual, unscalable codification of expert strategies. We propose \ours, a method that leverages large language models to autonomously induce both strategy actions and planning logic directly from raw transcripts. METRO formalizes expert knowledge into a Strategy Forest, a hierarchical structure that captures both short-term responses (nodes) and long-term strategic foresight (branches). Experimental results across two benchmarks show that METRO demonstrates promising performance, outperforming existing methods by an average of 9%-10%. Our further analysis not only reveals the success behind METRO (strategic behavioral diversity and foresight), but also demonstrates its robust cross-task transferability. This offers new insights into building non-collaborative agents in a cost-effective and scalable way. Our code is available at https://github.com/Humphrey-0125/METRO.

GhostCite: A Large-Scale Analysis of Citation Validity in the Age of Large Language Models

Citations provide the basis for trusting scientific claims; when they are invalid or fabricated, this trust collapses. With the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs), this risk has intensified: LLMs are increasingly used for academic writing, yet their tendency to fabricate citations (``ghost citations'') poses a systemic threat to citation validity. To quantify this threat and inform mitigation, we develop CiteVerifier, an open-source framework for large-scale citation verification, and conduct the first comprehensive study of citation validity in the LLM era through three experiments built on it. We benchmark 13 state-of-the-art LLMs on citation generation across 40 research domains, finding that all models hallucinate citations at rates from 14.23\% to 94.93\%, with significant variation across research domains. Moreover, we analyze 2.2 million citations from 56,381 papers published at top-tier AI/ML and Security venues (2020--2025), confirming that 1.07\% of papers contain invalid or fabricated citations (604 papers), with an 80.9\% increase in 2025 alone. Furthermore, we survey 97 researchers and analyze 94 valid responses after removing 3 conflicting samples, revealing a critical ``verification gap'': 41.5\% of researchers copy-paste BibTeX without checking and 44.4\% choose no-action responses when encountering suspicious references; meanwhile, 76.7\% of reviewers do not thoroughly check references and 80.0\% never suspect fake citations. Our findings reveal an accelerating crisis where unreliable AI tools, combined with inadequate human verification by researchers and insufficient peer review scrutiny, enable fabricated citations to contaminate the scientific record. We propose interventions for researchers, venues, and tool developers to protect citation integrity.