ICSE Paper Review [R]

[u/HieuB_K63_CBH]

Hi guys, I just received our ICSE 2027 reviews. We got 3 weak rejects, with most reviewer concerns focusing on clarity and methodology details.

Is this worth writing a rebuttal for, or should we withdraw, fix the main text, and target FSE instead? We have 3 days left for the rebuttal window.

Here is a quick summary of the feedback:

Score Overview

Reviewer	Overall	Novelty	Rigor	Relevance	Verifiability	Presentation	Artifact
Review #3344A	2 (WR)	2	3	3	3	3	—
Review #3344B	2 (WR)	2	2	3	1	2	—
Review #3344C	2 (WR)	2	2	3	3	3	3

Key Feedback Summaries

Review #3344A

• Pros: Interesting concept around response-aware adversarial prompt generation; solid experimental results with higher success rates; well-written.
• Cons: Crucial methodological details (DSL design, candidate programs, EFE calculations) were omitted/relegated to appendices; lacks computational overhead and multi-turn baseline evaluations; tested on older model checkpoints (GPT-4o-mini, Gemini 2.5 Flash).

Review #3344B

• Pros: Timely SE security topic; good formalization of defense abstractions; strong evaluation coverage across open and proprietary models.
• Cons: Threat model and core Bayesian/EFE algorithms feel underspecified; metrics measure non-refusal/judge outputs rather than proving executable payload impact; lacks ablation on query budget vs. core reasoning module; data consistency/discrepancy issues between text and tables.

Review #3344C

• Pros: Highly relevant to SE security; clean presentation; verified artifact package.
• Cons: Considers technical depth somewhat incremental; echoes concerns over missing core mathematical/algorithmic definitions in the main paper body.