ML Conference Reviewers Ignore Rebuttals and Change Scores Anyway

“Got three papers to review for ICLR and five for AAMAS, and believe me the quality of these papers is insanely bad. I would even refrain from accepting them to a workshop, let alone be main venues. A sincere request; Please don't submit the paper unless it is ready and if you are a first timer, please please get a feedback from a mentor out. Otherwise you are just wasting the time of so many reviewers out there submitted by /u/Fantastic-Nerve-4056 [link] [comments]”

“Months of work and dealing with toxic people. Will submit to a Q1 review. Regardless of the referee's opinion, I'm proud of my scientific growth. submitted by /u/No_Upstairs_280 [link] [comments]”

“I’m writing the discussion for my thesis and I realised I just messed it all up since I'm basically repeating the entire literature review. Im struggling to interpret the findings, because Im the only person who has researched this quantitatively (all my lit review papers are qual) and I did regression, so I cant even imply causality. Just associations, so I can’t really compare effect sizes or say “this matches X’s results.” I end up either summarising what the qualitative studies found aga”

“Hello! I'm applying this season, and I've done some independent research with 2 other peers. We were accepted for publication twice at IEEE conferences and had the full green light. However, we decided not to publish because A: it was $235 per author and we didn't have the money and B: it's a device we created and we wanted to make it better before we release it to the public. So, on my ECs, I have it listed as selected for publication at _____ and _____ conferences, etc. I'm”

“I got my major corrections at a UK university in a remote sensing/machine learning subject area. I am worried because the external examiner has misunderstood an aspect of my methodology which will influence how I respond to their list of corrections. Honestly, now that I've read the corrections and realised the methodological mistakes I'm surprised I passed at all. It will be clear that by responding to the corrections, the new data I provide will reveal a whole new host of other problem”

“Basically the title. Due to the nonsensical situation of NeurIPS being fully sold out before the results were even released, I couldn't get workshop registration (my paper is in the main track, which apparently doesn't have any sort of gaurantee for registrations in other parts of the conference like workshops). My experience with conferences has been with full registrations, so I don't really know how the experience goes if I only have registration for the main conference and not th”

Thanks for listening — you're right about the abstract. I made another version that uses the paper text where available, with the method, evaluation and headline numbers spoken out loud. https://roozypod.com/episode/7521e018-1b07-4268-90ab-e59d66f6dd50 It's…

submitted by /u/SaltyShock7484 [link] [comments]

“Half of one sentence in my paper trails onto page 10... This must have happened after a small edit and recompile of the pdf on resubmission? but this got me desk rejected??? Is this normal?? This wasn't even flagged by the official LLM feedback? Like whats the point of providing LLM feedback if it can't catch this. I don't need an AI slop breakdown of my papers strengths and weaknesses, I need to know that i didn't miss any ridiculous formatting mistakes that would lead to a desk”

“The way I review a paper has stayed substantially the same, except for an added step. Trying to get a sense of how common it is here. Nowadays I do the review, and I upload my review to an AI to ask for second thoughts. I don't ever upload a paper I'm reviewing, though. The authors can do it themselves (if they want to, it's their call). So in the end, it's even more work for me. Not fun. But it has produced higher quality reviews, most of the time. And less typos. submitte”

“I am a masters student and realized the paper I published has claims that are too strong for the nature of the work. It was in a low impact journal. What do I do? submitted by /u/Massive_Ad4376 [link] [comments]”

“So I have the following situation: I have recently presented at a conference. The project I presented was my Master's project that I did during my MA at University 1. Since doing this project, I went on to do a second Master's degree at University 2, in a different discipline and with a pretty different thesis topic. I have also been a research assistant at Uni 2 since I graduated this summer. At the conference, I presented myself as affiliated with both unis, although in the program onl”

“Recently, there was a post here where the OP assumed their reviewers were asking for the OP to cite one of their reviewer's papers. In OP's case, their reviewer didn't state it was their own paper and OP just guessed. However, I had a case where someone outright told me to cite a paper of theirs. I won't quote the direct phrasing for anonymity on my side but it was stated quite outright. This was (and is) my first paper published and upon consulting with a few people I added the”

“Just spend 4h reviewing a paper while I was sick, gave it a 3/4. This morning got an email saying it's desk rejected. I saw many people around me also have many papers desk rejected. I heard, though idk how true it is, some people use multiple accounts to bypass the 20 paper limit and all their paper got DR. edit: I mean ICLR submitted by /u/Striking-Warning9533 [link] [comments]”

“Soooo… My paper, which is one of proof-of-concept scope, is now on its 6th reviewer. 1 endorsed it after revisions 2 had the same comments as 1 but rejected 3 had some stats questions, I responded, they stopped responding, then got “revoked” by the journal in question. Then the editor brought on reviewers 4, 5, 6 essentially at the same time. All 3 of these new reviews: - State the paper is a promising proof of concept paper and well scoped - Summarize the paper’s results - Then go on to state t”

“I’m developing a $400 independent retrieval assessment: two existing configurations, up to 30 queries, and reproducible findings on regressions and scoring consistency. Fixes aren’t included. The question I’m trying to resolve is where that scope leaves too much work with the buyer. If you’ve paid for external technical QA—or considered it and decided against it—could you share one actual example? - What triggered the decision: a client handoff, migration, incident, or something else? -”

“I think a short section can earn the title, as long as people can get to it fast. What I've seen work is putting a timestamp in the first line of the description, something like "the regret story starts at 41:10", plus a chapter marker at that spot. Nobody who clicked for that story has to dig for it. The other half is a quick line in the intro, under 30 seconds, saying the guest gets into quitting and regretting it later, and what else you cover. That sets the expectation before a”

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“Thanks for trying it, and for the honest notes. Could you share the link to the check where an opinion came back as "contradicted"? Every run has its own link in the address bar. Opinions are supposed to be filtered out before checking, so that's a bug I'd like to look at, and the same for the sentence that was split badly. And yes, the uncle use case is exactly why the share links exist. [re: The "Great Wall is visible from the Moon" myth is older than spaceflight, so I built”

“All seems a bit pointless now. Either pump out AI papers and neglect your own development, or take it slow and fall behind in the publishing race. I already have two papers made largely without LLMs (still seeking publication), but it's hard to resist just vibing the third from start to finish with Claude. submitted by /u/SeaAccomplished441 [link] [comments]”

“Quick question for those currently reviewing papers for ICLR: Are you using AI tools to assist with your reviews, or are you still doing everything the old way? submitted by /u/Hope999991 [link] [comments]”

“Came across this GitHub project called Paper Review Harness. Thought it might be useful for people preparing ML research papers. It uses 30 different AI reviewer personas to simulate the kind of feedback a paper might receive at conferences like CVPR, ICLR, ICML, and NeurIPS. What's interesting is that it goes beyond simply asking an LLM to "review my paper." It provides: Independent reviews from different reviewer perspectives Section-level scores and detailed criticism Identifica”

“My paper cited and even built up on a niche topic that was accepted in 2024. The template and everything was also followed properly. Sure, it wasn't too novel, but it was damn rigorous, robust and reproducible. Still, I got desk rejected within 2 days. 2 days. With no comment. I grinded my ass off for the past 5 months, but 2 days was enough to judge it I suppose. Anyways, any recommendations on what to do next? I'm an undergrad graduating in 2 years. I wanted something good in profile f”

“Cool. Needs peer review mr random claim with no source so the study methodology and sample size can't be validated. [re: why are a lot of people especially on reddit in denial of how good ai coding has become?]”

“I know it's early but I've been browsing through ICLR OpenReview and I see a lot of good papers! Maybe the first big conference with automated research submission and it is increasingly becoming harder to detect AI-written text - how are you dealing with this? How are you even identifying slop papers? How much potential accepts, high quality research or AI-slops you see in your batch? submitted by /u/ade17_in [link] [comments]”

“For the sake of transparency, which journals have you submitted to and when did you get your first/second/etc comments back? submitted by /u/tearowelly [link] [comments]”

“Academics often write papers that are disconnected from the realities on the ground. The increase in review times is a historical artifact of how human software development has been done. But these practices are changing, and we are seeing these bottlenecks relieved by AI reviews. [re: Harvard just released another study about AI productivity in software engineering and it found there is no increase in productivity from using Claude code.]”

“This is pretty insightful:> One thing to keep in mind about this drop of papers is that they were not created by OpenAI with the main goal of making progress in mathematical research, or even primarily for PR (there were some PR posts, but e.g. the final announcement was comparatively restrained). The main reason these papers exist is that OpenAI used unsolved math problems to evaluate their internal models for the purpose of improving their capabilities. They had to use hard open problems becau”

“I'm an EE PhD student and I just experienced the textbook definition of reviewer retaliation. Around 1 month ago, I submitted a paper to Scientific Reports , and I want to share the experience I got after refusing to play the self-citation game. Reviewer 5 initially liked the manuscript. Their opening remarks were solid, he said about the paper "The article seems good with sufficient content and reference section." But then at comment 5. They dropped two specific DOIs and wrote: &q”

“I submitted my first paper to a SAGE journal. After admin processing (1 week), reviewer selection/assignment (3 weeks), awaiting reviewer scores (6 weeks) the silverchair status went to "awaiting recommendation" and sat there for a week. Now it changed to "awaiting final decision". Does that indicate a "reject" because it is a "final decision" or can a "final decision" also be "major/minor revisions"? Thanks. And I know: I should rather”

ICLR has received >40k submissions this year and it is becoming quite difficult to make sense of all of the papers (including a lot of AI generated ones). Larry Wasserman called for…

“Yes'nt The process is exactly as you described; but the path is a different one. You would go to a conference (you can google ACL for an example) and there you would hand in your paper anonymously, then it gets reviewed over the course of a month or two, to give the reviewing (and also anonymous) experts time to thoroughly check your claims. After this check is done (usually 3 random experts check your claims) another meta-judge checks the experts opinions and then decides the following: Is”

“Back in June, my first ever piece of proper research (remote sensing/computer vision) got into a conference (wooooo). I have absolutely no insight into how well its holding up, and would appreciate some opinions on the info I have about it. Doing good? Average? Do metrics even matter? The main thing that got me curious was that compared to other work from my faculty that went to the same conference: I have equal or less total views, but wayyy higher XML/BibTeX/EndNote numbers, about double some”

“I want to commit my ARR paper to EACL 2027 and I see I have to attach a pdf. Should I address the reviewer comments/suggestions (minor things) in this version already or wait for camera ready if accepted? I thought I just had to provide the link to the reviews but now I am confused. submitted by /u/Mundane_Slice_8621 [link] [comments]”

“Are there actually fewer submissions this cycle or are people waiting for ARR Aug Meta to be out? I saw an 1.8k submission ID yesterday. submitted by /u/StriderKing27 [link] [comments]”

“Thoughts on this wording as a nudge to a colleague who’s been hard to get a response from? Reasonable, or a bit much to treat silence as agreement? submitted by /u/BannedForThe7thTime [link] [comments]”

“For those who have gone through the KDD review process, how did it go? Did you submit a rebuttal or decide to withdraw? Did reviewers respond or change their scores afterward? Curious to hear whether rebuttals actually made a difference, especially for papers with initially low scores. submitted by /u/Cautious-History-351 [link] [comments]”

“Are they sending to all reviewers or some selected reviewers? Just got an email about complimentary registration. submitted by /u/Intrepid_Discount_67 [link] [comments]”

“Problem Someone writing a thesis or paper already has a draft full of claims and citations. Keryx only answers new questions; it cannot check whether the claims in an existing draft are supported by the sources they cite. That check is done repeatedly through a writing project, and it is where a wrong citation does the most damage. Proposal A draft check: paste a passage with its references and get a claim by claim verdict. Input: a paragraph or section, and its reference list (BibTeX, RIS, DOIs”

“I feel his pain. What openai is doing is the equivalent of posting a 200 file diff PR that is likely all slop and then hope that real mathematicians will verify their work. It's a PR stunt. [re: Fields Medalist Terence Tao reposts statement from the Association for Human Mathematics urging mathematicians to stop working with OpenAI for continuing to solve open math problems against their recommendations]”

“OpenAI asked them how they can send them in for review. [re: Fields Medalist Terence Tao reposts statement from the Association for Human Mathematics urging mathematicians to stop working with OpenAI for continuing to solve open math problems against their recommendations]”

“Whenever I try to click on the website it says 504 error. I hope they fix it soon because the resgistration deadline for the upcoming issue is October 25th and I am planning to pay if they fix it. Update: As of Oct. 07 it has still not been fixed for me atleast. We are now at the three week mark and they have not replied to my emails. submitted by /u/ExoticEstimate3688 [link] [comments]”

“For context, I'd published a few peer-reviewed papers in my life. Not an academic, though I did have a go at it back when I considered making it my profession. My current profession has nothing to do w/ the academia, so I do research as a hobby. W/ the recent advancements made by AI in science (especially in maths), I'm rethinking whether my work has any meaning anymore. If AI can think of the pertinent research gaps, collect the data, do the analyses, and write the paper - what's th”

“I'm a Ai engineer with about 2 years work experience, but let's just assume that I was a undergraduate student just starting out where would I begin so that I can publish a A* conference paper at some point. Learn python -> Learn ML & Maths -> Read other research papers -> find a topic ? -> choose a question try to run experiments and get results to write them down in a paper ? For context : I'm trying to get in MS CS programs for Fall 2028 in states with the plans of”

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“Was heavily involved in a research study (consented patients, collected data, performed EKGs , etc) and helped with editing the paper. The manuscript has been submitted to two journals but was sadly rejected by both :( (from my understanding its because it wasnt "important enough" and i guess journals have a limited number of papers they can publish??) (correct me if im wrong) but anyways, it isnt currently published so i was wondering if this would still be considered a meaningful res”

“How do you guys really pitch your papers to a journal when you have no support from your supervisor? I'm going a bit crazy here. The requirements are so incredibly specific yet shallow! I was, for example, working on a very nice book review essay. Submitted in July, gets rejected in October, reason: It focuses too much on one singular book. I'm citing like 10 other books in order to establish a field. The book makes a complex argument that is impossible to reconstruct in a meaningful way”

“Anyone on HN that publishes and attends the big ML venues: There has been a lot of discussions about them being flooded. Our recent experience with NeurIPS confirms this. Tickets sold out within hours; many more submissions than reviewers can handle; organizers that are overwhelmed.Have you considered or attended any alternative venues that still felt similar in spirit to how the big ML conferences should be?Personally I always liked the openreview process, as well as the idea that one could sub”

“There's not good "research" in those areas, because if researched by academics who don't actually perform those tasks on a daily basis, they're bullshit. Also, a lot of those topics are inter-dependent, aka you can't prioritize very well if your strategy is incoherent.... which is why you end up with 1 book cover many of those topics. (I connect these things in a Pattern Language.) Are you an ex-engineer? How long have you been a PM? Do you have a degree, if so what maj”

“Twitter and reddit communities generally. I've got a couple scheduled agents running on chatgpt for this as well.”

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“I got my three papers to review, and it seems like they have changed the review score range again this year? It is now: –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– Based on your overall assessment of the submission, what is your recommended decision? Consider the paper’s overall soundness, significance, clarity, and contribution. 1: Clear rejection 2: Weak rejection 3: Weak acceptance 4: Clear acceptance –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– Which is very strange. I don't think it makes much sense t”

Measure time to an approved draft, including reviews and corrections

“Ooooooooh imma check that out. So it doesn't have to pull the whole damn paper into context, scramble-eggs with general knowledge, then produce some loosely associated slop? I likey”

“jev-reviewer is the best application I’ve seen. Very useful. You ask it a question of a paper and it jumps straight to/highlights the actual evidence in the paper. No broken LLM citations or hallucinations. I’ve forked it to work with any decision model.”

“If you were my PhD supervisor, what would you say? BE REAL please. submitted by /u/NewClubSameBogey [link] [comments]”

“Has anyone received papers to review for round 2? submitted by /u/coconut-wasabi [link] [comments]”

“When I paste a few articles or a report and ask for a summary, I get a confident blend where I can't tell what's actually supported and what's someone's opinion. This prompt separates the two, which is the thing that matters when you're going to act on it. ``` I'm going to give you source material. Do not summarize it into one smooth narrative. Instead, build a table with these columns: - Claim (a specific assertion made in the source) - Type (fact stated, data point, opi”

“Hi, I’m a researcher working in computer vision. Over the past few years, I’ve submitted several papers to top-tier conferences such as NeurIPS, ICLR, and CVPR, and one concern that seems to come up repeatedly is 'novelty'. Given that thousands of papers are published every year at top conferences alone, not to mention the tens of thousands published across other conferences and journals, I sometimes wonder how much genuinely new novelty is realistically left to explore. In such a crowde”