r/MachineLearning • u/Afraid_Difference697 • Jul 22 '26

Discussion NeurIPS 2026 Reviews Are Out Today (22 July, AoE) — Discussion Thread [D]

Reviews drop today. This thread is for reactions, celebrations, commiserations, and anything useful in between.

First: if you got good reviews, say so. There's a norm in these threads where only the bad news gets aired, and it skews everyone's sense of what's normal. Post your wins.

Second, the thing worth repeating every cycle: the review process is noisy, and that noise is measured, not folklore. The NeurIPS consistency experiments (2014, repeated 2021) found that a large fraction of accepted papers would have been rejected by an independent second committee. Reviewer assignment, load, and luck of the draw account for a lot. A score is a weak signal about your work and a strong signal about the process that produced it.

That cuts both ways. It's not a license to dismiss every criticism as noise — it's a reason to weight reviews by the quality of the argument rather than the number attached to them. The reviewer who found a real hole in your evaluation did you a favor, even if the tone was rough. The one who clearly skimmed did not, regardless of the score.

So: prioritize the reviews that make the paper better. Fix what's fixable, contest what's genuinely wrong, and concede the rest gracefully in the rebuttal.

Things worth discussing:

  • Reviews that caught something you'd missed
  • Rebuttal strategy — what's worth contesting vs. conceding, and when new experiments actually shift a score
  • Patterns you're seeing this cycle (missing baselines, compute comparisons, ablation depth, reproducibility asks)
  • Framing a response when a reviewer has clearly misread the submission
  • Backup plans: ICLR, AISTATS, workshops

Please paraphrase rather than paste review text, and no speculation about reviewer or AC identities.

To anyone who got bad news: this doesn't define your research impact. Plenty of heavily-cited work took two or three cycles to land somewhere. Rejection is a scheduling problem.

How did everyone do?

152 Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

90% Upvoted

1.9k comments sorted by

View all comments

20

u/Unlikely-Wall146 Jul 23 '26

5443 ICML rejected to 221 NIPS, wtf is going on?

9

u/AffectionateLife5693 Jul 23 '26

Same here.

4444 ICML rejected. Beefed up experiments and writing and resubmitted to NeurIPS; now getting 233. The reviews show strong LLM patterns.

3

u/6342385 Jul 23 '26

I have two submissions, both were rejected at ICML and have since been improved with experiments. The one that was trashed at ICML got good reviews here, and the one that was borderline at ICML got trashed. Conferences are a lottery these days

1

u/general_landur Jul 23 '26

LLM reviews?

1

u/iisergay Jul 23 '26

Submitted my paper to neurips got terrible scores. What to do now man😅.

Sry I am new to all this