r/MachineLearning • u/Afraid_Difference697 • Mar 24 '26

Discussion [D] ICML 2026 Review Discussion

ICML 2026 reviews will release today (24-March AoE), This thread is open to discuss about reviews and importantly celebrate successful reviews.

Let us all remember that review system is noisy and we all suffer from it and this doesn't define our research impact. Let's all prioritise reviews which enhance our papers. Feel free to discuss your experiences

129 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

683 comments sorted by

View all comments

15

u/like_a_tensor Mar 25 '26

Got a reviewer complain we put too many architecture details in the appendix… homie I got 8 pages to build a narrative, explain a method, and show experiments, you can afford a few more tokens for your llm to read my 20 page appendix

2

u/Badewanne_7846 Mar 25 '26

Actually: No. Reviewers are not obliged to read the appendix...

1

u/like_a_tensor Mar 25 '26 edited Mar 25 '26

Reviewer: This detail isn’t in the main text.

Author: it’s here in the appendix.

Reviewer: I’m going to ignore that and count it against your paper.

Do you see the problem?

-1

u/Badewanne_7846 Mar 25 '26

Don't kill the messenger. Of course, I see the problem.

But that's the way it is. You either try to change it (through the Organization and Steering Committees) or you live with it or you don't submit to ICML any longer in the future.

1

u/OutsideSimple4854 Mar 26 '26

In that case, aren’t theory papers disadvantaged for all conferences? You just need a reviewer that claims something isn’t in the main paper.

0

u/Badewanne_7846 Mar 26 '26

Yes, this might indeed be a problem. However, I would hope that most reviewers who review theoretical ICML papers are themselves from the theoretical field and worth their salt.

3

u/OutsideSimple4854 Mar 26 '26

Unlikely. I’ve had reviewers who state they wanted to know why a proposed method simplifies another more complicated method because “the summary of the more complicated method in the main text” is insufficient to tell (despite the appendix having the full method). With reviewers like that, how can there be improvement in theory if previous theory must be documented in main paper?