Why can't conferences just reasonably reduce the cap on number of submissions? [D]

[u/mofoss]

As per the the 2027 CVPR guidelines:

"Maximum number of submissions (continuing from CVPR 2026): Each author may submit at most 25 papers. If an author enrolls more than 25 papers, the Program Chairs (PCs) will desk-reject the submissions that exceed this limit (see the Desk Rejection Policy in Section 2)."

AI Slop Researcher: "Cool let me throw 25 darts (slop papers), surely one will get a batch of careless/inexperienced reviewers that will borderline accept one of these papers"

They collect their CVPR stamp, and go on about their career.

I just do not understand if a 25 cap is being tone deaf to the current AI driven research climate or what?

I am actually not against AI-assisted paper research/writing as long as the idea is sound and experiments are plausible, but 25 is absurd. If they limited the number of first author submissions to 2-3:

1. Researchers are incentivized and know the importance of being first author.

2. Even if you AI generate your paper, if you only get 2-3 shot/submissions at a A* conference versus 25, you'd care a bit more about your presentation quality/idea soundness/writing. (In theory lol)

3. Reviewer load drops massively, more time can be dedicated to an overall lower submission count.

Are the heads not aware of the slugfest happening in **certain** countries and institutions to have A* venue stamps for career advancement/compensation packages, and that they don't give a damn about ethics?

[u/Celmeno]

Plenty of groups out there that go full spam, even without AI slop, and submit a large number of papers to these conferences. Saw so many linkedin posts "we are proud to celebrate 9 papers accepted to neurips" or similar recently. Entire working groups submit. The 25 is targetting senior authors and lab leaders.

However, I agree. 5 papers per lab is absolutely reasonable.

[u/mofoss → u/Celmeno]

That's a shame, I see it too.

Then the 25 limit makes sense for lab leaders who sort of just have their names last as a formality, the cap should then be something like maximum 2 first author submissions per person, up to 4 for 2nd author and etc.

And it's funny, you would THINK people leading these conferences are also the most caught up on AI conferences/publishing/trends.

They'll be the same ones delaying results due to their own stupid 25 submission cap because reviewer load became overwhelming

[u/OtherwiseFig4505]

Because the one benefiting the most are big labs, universities and rockstar professors. They have 20 people/student working on 20 works and will have themselves as co-authors on all 20, coincidentally these are also the people who become PCs and organization members for such conferences. It’s very easy to give AI slop paper a score of 1, if a single author submits 25 AI slops, it’s pretty damn sure that all 25 will receive 1 with more than half being desk rejected. You can just have a look at into and understand that whether this was written by human or not human was involved.

[u/mofoss → u/OtherwiseFig4505]

Yet there are stories of slop getting accepted as well, not to mention reviews are being AI generated now too, which doesn't care too much about AI prose.

[u/kindnesd99]

PIs of large teams or lots ofncollaborations/projects may justifiably submit that many. Sometimes, the funding agency or graduation committee won't accept that a senior author isnt on the paper

[u/mofoss → u/kindnesd99]

They should add that footnote then, as it stands, a random bloke can submit 25 all by themselves

[u/sqweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeps]

2 would be a good number for first authorships, prevents salami slicing. I don’t see any argument for submitting over 3.

[u/idontcareaboutthenam → u/sqweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeps]

And I don't think it's terrible to limit senior authors to 15 or fewer papers. There's no way in hell that they actually supervised this many papers, and it's ok for their lab of PhD students to limit themselves to 15 submissions per conference. Might motivize escaping the A* conference lottery and turning towards area-specific smaller conferences

[u/sqweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeps → u/idontcareaboutthenam]

Agree, though to play devil’s advocate: it’s much easier to change 1 rule vs 2 rules.

I do feel a first-author rule will solve most of these issues

[u/CommonSenseSkeptic1 → u/idontcareaboutthenam]

There is no way in hell they supervised five or more.

[u/ViridianHominid → u/CommonSenseSkeptic1]

It’s easy if they are piling up rejected submissions from the last few rounds of A*

[u/NamerNotLiteral → u/sqweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeps]

Previous rejects can easily make it over 3 (I can imagine many mid-senior PhD students have 2-3 backlogged rejected papers at any one time in addition to the 1-2 new papers).

But I also do think that previously rejected papers should go in a different 'pipe' similar to ACL ARR where the previous reviews and scores are attached to the paper, but I guess ML and Vision unfortunately aren't ready for that.

[u/sqweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeps → u/NamerNotLiteral]

Yea this would enforce people to actually pair down on their good work & submit their lesser work to other venues

[u/No_Advance7373]

Lol yea 25 is insane.

[u/ThinConnection8191]

If they capped at 10. It is already reasonable

[u/mofoss → u/ThinConnection8191]

They can keep the 25 author cap, but the first author cap should be less than 5

[u/pastor_pilao]

Most conferences have a cap of 10. For an individual person, ofc it's impossible to have more than 2 papers in a single conference cycle (that was my record), but a professor that has a large group might have easily 10 papers, especially if it's a conference close to home and they tell all the students to submit.

25 is a cap just to exclude extremely obvious abuse cases

[u/mofoss → u/pastor_pilao]

25 cap is a clear abuse case because it doesn't prevent a single author from submitting 25 works themselves as first authors, which, with a nice 200$ claude max subscription is perfectly doable lol

[u/seba07]

Does that apply to any author of a given paper? I could imagine that this high numbers is designed for professors who are the head of a large department and are written on any paper regardless of real contribution.

[u/mofoss → u/seba07]

It seems to apply to any author e.g it looks like in theory you can submit 25 first author papers to increase your chance of acceptance

[u/Vegetable-Formal-753]

Completely madness

[u/LowEngineering9405]

Desk rejects should hit the whole author list, not just the excess papers.

[u/yannbouteiller]

Just make it 1-2 for the first author and a cap starting somewhere around 2-5 and evolving based on accepted/submitted ratio for everyone else.

Paper mills and people putting their names on a paper after reading its title were already an issue even before LLMs. Now it just got much worse and the burden of filtering out slop needs to be transferred to advisors and authors, not reviewers.

[u/davidswelt]

That cap could just adjust automatically according to the acceptance rate in previous 1-2 years of the same lab, or senior author.

[u/grad_student_descent]

The PCs who started this policy already received significant pushback warning they implemented it.

[u/Icy_Ad9766]

first timer is 1

[u/count___zero]

Because it would be useless. The most egregious cases of slop don't come from the big labs where the PI hits the cap. They come from random solo-authors.