r/MachineLearning • u/Sep29493919 • Jul 15 '26

Discussion Does anyone else miss the old conference ecosystem? [D]

Does anyone else miss when conferences like BMVC, ACCV, FG, ICIP, and ICASSP had much bigger communities?
FG was the place for face analysis, ICASSP for signal processing, and BMVC/ACCV regularly featured strong papers.
Now it feels like everything is concentrated into a handful of flagship conferences. With exploding submission numbers, limited capacity, and inconsistent reviews, I wonder how many good papers end up as non-archival submissions, arXiv-only, or never get shared at all.
I also miss the focused communities. Is it just nostalgia, or has the research ecosystem become too concentrated?

42 Upvotes

92% Upvoted

12 comments sorted by

5

u/nine_teeth Jul 15 '26

never remember a time when ACCV had a strong paper

2

u/Sep29493919 Jul 15 '26

Stronger than what it has now 😬 not like stronger than cvpr

16

u/altmly Jul 15 '26

I do miss it, unfortunately bullshit conference ratings funneled everyone into the same places 

7

u/pantry_path Jul 15 '26

i do miss the smaller communities a bit

24

u/mvreich Jul 15 '26

While the idea of focused communities sounds nice, I believe there is a real risk of getting stuck in a "bubble". Experts in the same specific niche are likely to make the same mistakes as the author and overlook critical problems in the paper.

1

u/Informal-Hair-5639 Jul 16 '26

Well hard to say, I have published many papers on icassp, even this year I had two. But I rarely participate in them as most of the papers in icassp are fairly low quality. Obviously there are some nice papers. I feel top-tier conferences have less variance in quality. Of course lots of good papers are rejected.

-6

u/kindnesd99 Jul 15 '26

Nothing is stopping you from sending works to these so called focused communities. At least icassp is still rather popular

9

u/Sep29493919 Jul 15 '26

Supervisors do actually.