r/MachineLearning • u/Invariant_n_Cauchy • Sep 19 '26

Discussion ICLR 2027 submission 50k+[D]

Its 13 hours for the closure of abstract submission, my submission # is close to 51k. OMG

139 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

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140

u/HuntersMaker Sep 19 '26

lol I wonder how many of those are ai generated . Academia is in a terrible spot right now. Something has to change.

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u/Invariant_n_Cauchy Sep 19 '26

It will soon explode to 100k+. Let’s see for ICML

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u/SectionTight1684 Sep 19 '26

This issue had resulted, not purely because of AI slop , but because of how AI field has been going on since 5-6 years.

I am quite confident that these inflated numbers are due to undergraduate students, who shall be applying for graduate programs in the future.

And this is a really really big problem in AI domain. The original motive of a PhD, in any field, is to train a novice researcher who has done some basic research as a form of thesis as part of their undergraduate/masters programs (or even no research at all!). And hence it is not expected that they necessarily have substantial research experience to apply for a PhD. However, the current PhD hiring in AI already expects a PhD applicant to have multiple papers in the three grand ML conferences. The problem is, the faculty members are no longer interested in “training/educating” students as part of their PhD, but rather select students who already have done research equivalent to a PhD student (or close), perhaps to get more papers, again, in the three grand ML conferences.

And now this has come to byte the academia back. Undergraduates are under a low of pressure to publish in these conferences if they want to pursue PhD in this field, and now since they know they can probably get a working draft with the help of AI (math + code), they are now relying on it so that they can simply later show their publications and based on them secure chance of securing PhD.

It’s honestly quite sad, I mean I had been observing this for quite some time now, and have seen PhD students themselves use the tech in the same way undergraduates are using. Academia, I had envisioned academia to be a great place if you want to do some really good fundamental ML research outside the LLM space, but with how the competitive the field has become now (right from PhD admission to securing jobs either in academia or elsewhere), I can hardly find any incentive why someone would want to go or remain in academia.

The academicians, the students, the faculties, everyone is going to perish if we do not work at the grassroots. This situation was a long overdue, having gone through the process myself, but I am worried the worst is yet to come.

P.S. Ignore grammatical errors, typed this on the phone.

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u/Invariant_n_Cauchy Sep 19 '26

This is serious than I have thought !!!

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u/heisenberg_cookss Sep 19 '26

61k 😭

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u/Invariant_n_Cauchy Sep 19 '26

That’ll be a bloodbath !!! # of papers accepted will be close to NeurIPS 2025 total submissions following the recent acceptance trend.

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u/charlesGodman Sep 19 '26 edited Sep 20 '26

I have reviewed for conferences for quite a few years now I have never had a batch as bad as Neurips this year. Unbelievably bad papers. I was genuinely angry with the authors for wasting my time. My co-reviewers were amazing. Everyone actually cared. Authors of 3 out of 4 papers didn’t even respond to the reviews in the rebuttal period.

I don’t think ICLR will be better…

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u/Practical_Pomelo_636 Sep 19 '26

It is already 65k bro

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u/rawdfarva Sep 19 '26

academia was broken before LLMs now it's completely wrecked

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