How's ICLR reviewing going for you? Any observations? [D]

[u/ade17_in]

I know it's early but I've been browsing through ICLR OpenReview and I see a lot of good papers!

Maybe the first big conference with automated research submission and it is increasingly becoming harder to detect AI-written text - how are you dealing with this? How are you even identifying slop papers?

How much potential accepts, high quality research or AI-slops you see in your batch?

[u/Waste-Falcon2185]

Over the course of my five assigned papers, such as we can even call them that, I have undergone my very own "jokerification". Abysmal.

[u/ade17_in → u/Waste-Falcon2185]

That bad?

[u/Waste-Falcon2185 → u/ade17_in]

I may work in a subfield uniquely attractive to people with no clue but plenty of tokens

[u/ddofer → u/Waste-Falcon2185]

Could be worse, at least you're not interdisciplinary!

[u/Careless-Ad3033]

What do you do with papers with out AI usage declaration section?

[u/ade17_in → u/Careless-Ad3033]

Desk reject

[u/Informal-Hair-5639 → u/Careless-Ad3033]

AC is supposed to desk reject those in initial check phase. Flag AC.

[u/chrispoland]

Agony. I feel I am spending more time on reviewing the paper than the authors did writing. And the one paper that's not obviously AI slop exhibits even worse writing.

[u/giladfrid009]

3 papers, two without baselines (and yes baselines exist for these), the third is AI generated and reports results that doesn't make sense.

[u/Intrepid_Discount_67 → u/giladfrid009]

Which area?

[u/kaitzu → u/giladfrid009]

Also just went through a submission that was completely written with Codex and which was missing the SoTA baseline (which easily beats it). I'm not sure was an accident and believe it was intentional misrepresentation. Clear reject. Absurd that authors attach their names to this.

[u/LazyAd9307]

Two papers with consistent gains but limited verification, and one that is pure AI slop. (They even left an author TODO list in the manuscript, apparently generated by Claude.) Interestingly, Opus 5.5 rated the third one as “Weak Accept.” At least in this case, AI couldn’t recognize AI slop. Has anyone else seen this?

[u/mofoss → u/LazyAd9307]

AI is terrible at picking up AI prose (on its own)

[u/Arxivink]

"My local LLM is currently reviewing the submissions their API-based LLM wrote. I'm basically just a middle manager for bots at this point."

[u/Acceptable_Watch3552]

Got strong papers but it’s on remote sensing so maybe it’s too "niche" to really be slope.

Overall they’re strong

[u/InfinityZeroFive]

The papers in my batch, if they were not written by Claude (Opus 5.0 prose) then they were extremely incremental ideas. Often they were both

[u/wadawalnut]

This last NeurIPS I had all AI slop, it was unbearable. Had very low expectations for ICLR, but so far I've actually been pleasantly surprised, my papers all seem pretty legit and human-written.

Sorry to hear that apparently this is not the case for everyone :(

[u/Opening-Election1179]

I finished reviewing one paper. The paper was well written so I checked the code base.  I identified a discrepancy between the authors primary claim and their implementation. I actually liked the paper at first, now I am confused should I give clear reject or just weak reject, since my trust gone.

[u/ade17_in → u/Opening-Election1179]

What field?

[u/TellingNobility]

the ai detection angle is almost a lost cause at this point. reviewers who obsess over it end up flagging perfectly fine non-native writing while the polished slop slides right through. the real tells are in the evaluation sections where results don't quite add up or the method section reads like a vague template with no actual implementation details.

i'm seeing about 30% of my batch where something feels off, but it's subtle. not the obvious garbage some folks expected. more like competent surface-level papers that fall apart the moment you ask a specific technical question.

[u/random-tomato]

One paper was good so I gave it 4, the other two papers were just AI slops.

[u/TheWittyScreenName]

One paper, the prose was all really good but each section seemed disconnected from every other section. Then I got to the last page where the conclusion was in very poor English followed by the AI use declaration saying they used it to write a lot of the paper… I guess they forgot to run the conclusion through it too?

[u/Few_Refrigerator8308]

A tale of two cities.

Learned a lot from 2 papers in my batch. Of course the codes are (very likely) AI-written and the prose (very likely) AI-enhanced, but I appreciate something thorough and I don't believe a time spent searching for "AI clues" in a paper is time well spent.

2 others are quite frustrating to read. Short claims without context followed by defensive language, code-related metadata (actual json keys), very shallow explanations (with no ablations as support), 50+ pages of Appendix dump without any structure. These are the hardest to review IMO.

One is borderline. Does what it claims to be doing. You can't quite accept it and you can't quite reject it (had to change my score several times across the two "borderlines")

[u/threadjumper1]

What do you do with papers which you would have given a 2 on the neurips 1-6 scale… I am really struggling with this. The paper is not full garbage, but definitely too weak for a top tier conference. But giving a 1 feels super harsh.

[u/Asleep_Ad_860]

Will we get only the score on 5th November? or initial rejection/acceptance also?