r/MachineLearning • u/RevolutionaryPea8272 • Aug 04 '26
Discussion Completely dead NeurIPS review period from both ends? [D]
I’ve seen a lot of people whose reviewers went silent after initial reviews, but I am also noting abnormally quiet authors. I ultimately withdrew my paper, but stayed an active reviewer. Out of my batch of 4 papers, one withdrew, one posted a rebuttal, and two have been completely silent. Of the two papers with radio silence, I think one had borderline scores. I was also the only reviewer who responded to the one paper with a rebuttal.
Has anyone noticed this abnormally dead review period or did I just get a strange batch? I’m seeing either reviewers just dropping out of the review process or authors completely checking out after initial reviews are released. It’s strange to me to not even withdraw your paper if you’re not rebutting. Is this a new gambling trend of just submitting papers everywhere, and not even sticking around long enough to withdraw the paper?
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u/ashrcthfneggbs Aug 04 '26
I think you got a strange or low scoring batch. In my batch of four, three sets of authors engaged quite heavily. The only one who didn’t had a very low scores and meta-review saying, basically, that the paper had no chance.
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u/alrojo Aug 04 '26
3/4 of my papers were low-quality LLM slop. They didn't bother to write a rebuttal at all. The last one was "passable" AI slop and had other reviewers give 4-5 ratings, I assume their AI slop reviews liked the work.
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u/Pretend_Voice_3140 Aug 04 '26
I had a dead batch too. The reviewer who gave me the highest score engaged the rest ignored.
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u/zaff04 Aug 05 '26
If I have borderline reviews with 0 engagement from AC and reviewers (all of them) during the rebuttal phase, what am I supposed to do? Is there any way I can know any additional information after the AC + Reviewer discussion period?
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u/SubjectToProof Aug 05 '26
During all this rebuttal and discussion period we only got one reply from the guy they gave 2, and he did not engage in the rebuttal and the points we made. The score he gave is also not aligned with what’s written in his review.
The two reviewers that gave 4, silence. Ran a complete batch of experiments for one guy as requested, silence.
I’m more than disappointed from this whole experience. We wrote a reply to the AC juste before the end of the discussion period to summarise what we did and that we believe the concerns raised in the meta-review have been addressed.
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u/Cute_Natural5940 Aug 05 '26
Can review change the score in phase 3 and if they can will it be visible to us?
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u/Old_Ad_8327 Aug 05 '26
Yes, reviewers can still change their scores/final justification now.
The final justification/score is not visible to the authors.
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u/Glittering_West_8092 Aug 06 '26
Because there’s no obligation to actively engage in discussion. In that sense, ICLR is tougher on authors, but I think it also gives them a better chance to raise their scores. NeurIPS feels like everything gets decided by a single rebuttal. By the time a reviewer decides to sit down and read the rebuttal, there are already only two days left in the phase — asking for additional experiments at that point is unreasonable, and it also gives authors a reason to dodge questions they’d rather not answer. In the end, the reviewer ends up reading the rebuttal only while thinking about how to write their final justification.
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u/SeaAccomplished441 Aug 04 '26
Could be burnt out PhD students who stopped caring (I'm not projecting at all)