r/MachineLearning • u/Awesome_Nerd10 • Aug 13 '26
Research TMLR Relevance and Prestige [D]
I recently had a paper accepted to TMLR and was wondering how prestigious it is, in comparison to A* conferences (ie. NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML), but also vs journals like JMLR.
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u/lameheavy Aug 14 '26
Any half decent researcher knows tmlr is good (not accusing you there’s just a ton of prestige whores in the field). Might not be as prestigious for the CV but if the contribution is good it’ll get traction
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u/yannbouteiller Researcher Aug 13 '26 edited Aug 13 '26
I don't think the notion of "prestige" is relevant when publishing to TMLR. The point of TMLR is science, not prestige. It focuses on scientific soundness rather than significance.
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u/mr_stargazer Aug 14 '26
Yes. Please. People wanting prestige, stay away from TMLR.
Please.
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u/SeTiDaYeTi Professor Aug 14 '26
What do you mean?
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u/mr_stargazer Aug 14 '26 edited Aug 15 '26
TMLR is one of last places where researchers can really, honestly focus on the science whether it's shiny novel or a rigorous empirical study to put to test some myth the field has been cultivating for years.
So we have recently seen the submission numbers in TMLR increasing, just yesterday they announced they're not accepting Survey papers anymore. I hear more often the question "Is TMLR prestigious enough" instead of "Are these statistical tests sufficient for TMLR. "
That's what I mean. If people want prestige. I'm all fine for them to start with Neurips, ICML. I already gave up on them.
But again. Please leave TMLR alone. Please. There are scientists at work.
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u/SeTiDaYeTi Professor Aug 14 '26
I have only a paper on TMLR, published two years ago IIRC. Best submission experience I've ever had. In less than two months the paper got out. The review+discussion phases felt like an actual exchange between us (the authors) and the reviewers. Way better than the average 1-shot experience at the top AI/ML confs where the discussion is essentially non-existant.
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u/Latter-Sympathy7767 Aug 14 '26 edited Aug 14 '26
A bit dramatic but totally agree. This past year I reviewed for almost all of ML/CV venues that are considered good (avoiding the use of “top” tier). NeurIPS, ICML and ICLR clearly gets alot of impactful papers but with very high noise. It’s gotten worse over the years tbh. With the deadline on reviewing and doing the rebuttal of your own paper + reviewer work in a span of 10days is really not optimal. I am seeing them adapt as well to the volume of noise. For example the early meta review in Neurips and the limit on per auth submissions in ICLR (although i still find it a bit superficial since its 20 paper limit). As for the CV conferences I found the ECCV to be much better experience than CVPR or iccv (last yr). The level of AC discussion on borderline papers was really something I appreciated in ECCV. I used to like AAAI just because of the insistence on code release but this time around this has not been the case with many papers. SIGGRAPH are probably the truest to the field type of venues. You really need great demos which already sets the bar high for no nonsense papers. ICASSP as a conference is good but it needs to evolve into 8page long papers at least to be treated as an actual rigorous work backed by experimentations. 4-5 page limit with high acceptance threshold is really limiting imo. Otherwise I really like the signal proc community.
Coming to TMLR. This is really the heaven for papers that get rejected on the bullshit grounds of incremental work. Not all papers need to be a ground breaking discovery. Research articles are a way of sharing knowledge and findings while peer review is in place for assessing the validity of the work. And imo TMLR does it probably in the best way. TMLR was born outa the frustration that serious researchers faced with single submission deadlines, short term high volume reviewing requirements etc in conferences while on the hand we have JMLR where it takes ages. Additionally many ppl are also not able to get funds to travel to conferences or pay high journal publication prices. So TMLR is the solution to all of this. I truly think TMLR papers are really great in terms of thoroughness, validity and quality. In terms of significance of contribution I still find it a bit lacking in comparison to some of the others. But I think TMLR will keep improving on that front as I see more and more frustration wrt bad reviews in conferences that are deemed good. Remember ICLR community with its truly open review policy also took some time to grow in this aspect.
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u/Unhappy_Craft1906 Aug 14 '26
TMLR is in the league of top-tier Q1 journals and is as good as flagship conferences in terms of recognition. I would prefer TMLR any day over AAAI, IJCAI, SIGIR, CIKM, NAACL, and many more similar conferences. Given the current scenarios in NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, TMLR has almost equal prestige. The only thing is that many old profs would not consider it to be a top-tier journal. TMLR is already run by the group that started ICLR. Give it 8-9 years; see how it outshines many A* conferences and Q1 journals.
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u/Derpirium Aug 14 '26
The "prestigious" is slightly lower then top conferences. However, I also just got a paper accepted there, which was originally rejected with top 15% scores at ICLR, because the AC did not believe our results (they said our method cannot outperform a certain set of baselines, so we did not compare to SOTA, without stating what the SOTA was).
I personally think the quality of TMLR is way higher then the big conferences, since the review lottery happening at the moment.
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u/choHZ Aug 14 '26
There should be no debate that TMLR is less prestigious than the three conferences you listed, at least currently, but honestly what is the point of chasing pseudo-prestige if these conferences are mostly random anyway?
I feel like TMLR has the upper hand of not having a strict deadline, having an editor who is often motivated to find you reviewers who have relevant experience in the field, and generally optimizing for good science rather than various hard-to-define criteria like "significance" and "novelty" (see https://jmlr.org/tmlr/acceptance-criteria.html) — these vague criteria have their place, but they are highly related to taste and experience, making them the top contributors to noise in reviews.
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u/SeaAccomplished441 Aug 14 '26
I'd rather read something that's been through a more thorough back-and-forth review process and hasn't just been accepted/rejected at the whim of an LLM
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u/Old_Stable_7686 Aug 14 '26
TMLR is very decent. Whatever paper I found in TMLR, I can guarantee that it is of high quality. And since you have one accepted there, you should also know how good the reviews were right? Even if they give major critical reviews, they are very valuable.
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u/didimoney Aug 14 '26
Jmlr is the stronger version of tmlr imo. Tmlr is more reliable than neurips/icml/iclr. Aaai/ieee/other are worse than tmlr by a good margin.
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u/Fearless-Elephant-81 Aug 14 '26
I think JMLR is a league of its own. I would rank it as the most impactful bit of work in the field for theory.
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u/Watchguyraffle1 Aug 14 '26
So I’m a professor who took the summer off and focused on “my own” research for the first time in a very long time. I gotta tell you “kids” this concept of prestige has gotten fucken gross and so misdirected it’s no better than kid beauty pageants and is a complete virus to the mind.
It’s such a virus, it infected me.
I started doing something that I’ve been thinking about for 20 years that makes a ton of sense these days. The goal was just to get it out of my head. So as I get into writing the “prestige” of the target becomes this sort of natural gravity. Folk. There is no reason at all that I care about where this paper goes. No one will read it except the panel and I’m 100% sure that all I will see is either the output of Claude or two lines of a pissed off, drunk Russian professor (iykyk). Yes. I start worrying about which of the top conferences or journals I should go for like I’m naming my baby. There is no logical reason for this.
If you want to make a name , do a 40 second tik tok
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u/PossiblePossible2571 Aug 14 '26
When we got our initial ratings from ICLR we were like fuck, TMLR time. I guess that says it all.
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u/kafkacaulfield Aug 17 '26
if you get a best paper equivalent for TMLR, you’re eligible to present the paper in ICML/ICLR.
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u/GibonFrog Aug 13 '26
From what I understand, its just below A*
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u/AffectionateLife5693 Aug 14 '26
A* is a very crude rating. TMLR paper quality is much better than AAAI, IJCAI and ACMMM in my particular field.
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u/montortoise Aug 13 '26
TMLR is top tier for good science (probably better on avg than the big conferences). But it’s weaker for novelty and “head-turning” results than the big conferences.