ICML final decisions rant [D]

So, ICML accepted ~6.5K of ~24K; obviously, it doesn’t mean that all the rejected papers are “bad,” and these rejected papers would cascade to NeurIPS, blowing up NeurIPS’ total submission count, and this cycle of massive-influx-small-acceptance would repeat on an endless loop.

The reviews themselves can be frustratingly inadequate: – “Only 200 benchmarks included; not included didn’t-do-this-benchmark” (exaggerated for dramatic effect, sadly not unrealistic) or – “I don’t think this paper, that works, is ‘novel'” [out of gut feeling?] or – ACs reiterating the exact same points in the initial reviews without reading the rebuttal discussions. (Or at least, it’d seem that way)

On top of all this, (from Reddit threads,) it appears that reviewers raising their score need to perform additional tasks of justifying why they’re raising their scores — which seems like a negative reinforcement signal.

Also, it’s crazy how people can think of an idea, run all experiments, write a coherent acceptance-ready paper, all over the weekend!!! — isn’t the whole point of research is to sit and simmer with the problem?

Not sure what the future of conference publishing/reviewing is… it just feels unproductive.

Anyway, just wanted to rant before looping into NeurIPS deadline, for yet another possible rejection. Isn’t the whole point of publishing to understand long-standing problems? — rejection nowadays means nothing. [Neither does acceptance?]

Have a good weekend, y’all.