[R] Response to CVPR review that claims lack of novelty because they found our workshop preprint?

We received a weak reject rating from a reviewer whose primary concern was the following:

The major weakness of the paper is the strong overlap with the paper [ICMLW2025]… the paper is not clearly cited anywhere in the new manuscript.

The paper [ICMLW2025] is our own 3-page paper that we presented in a non-archival workshop at ICML 2025 and uploaded to arXiv. This type of workshop explicitly allows re-submission of content to future venues. Our CVPR submission tackles the same idea as the workshop paper but significantly expanded. We did not cite this workshop paper in the CVPR submission so as to maintain double-blind anonymity. For the same reason, we cannot clarify that it is our own paper in the rebuttal.

What’s the best way to handle this? Did we mess up by not citing it somehow in our CVPR submission? I suppose we can write a comment to the AC, but I’m not confident it will be noticed. Ideally I would like the reviewer to also reconsider their rating.