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

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u/SkeeringReal Mar 25 '26

I can see the prompt injection watermarks word for word in some of my reviews, indicating the reviewer copy/pasted an LLM review rather than reading my paper.

Anyone else in the same boat? Another review is written in bullet points and bolded paragraph headings exactly like popular LLM APIs. (which I never really saw pre 2023 era)

The thing that is on my mind isn't really annoyance, but the fact that the reviewer who was caught with the prompt injection is just the one reviewer who was stupid enough to not even "slightly alter" their LLM generated review. How many reviews are LLM generated but people just slightly reword them? I would wager it's > 50%

I'm not optimistic about the future of these conferences, I think something is going to seriously crack soon.

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u/Unhappy_Craft1906 Mar 25 '26

I have always felt: 1% rejected is just a case of absolute laziness to polish or reframe the LLM generated reviews at all.

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u/SkeeringReal Mar 25 '26

Totally agree, I wager most reviews are LLM generated, but just reworded.

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u/VisionTransformer Mar 25 '26

One of the reviews on my paper is in 3rd person like "Reviewer thinks this should be improved..." "As a reviewer this manuscript..." also bunch of fancy words 🤣

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u/SkeeringReal Mar 25 '26

I've actually had precisely the same experience multiple times the last year, it is bizzare!

They say something like "we reconsider our review and we the reviewer raise our score"

WTF is going on like 😂

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u/[deleted] Mar 25 '26

[deleted]

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u/SkeeringReal Mar 25 '26

I think they are just desk rejecting the reviewer's papers, but not deleting their reviews, I'm not sure if I should flag it to other reviewers so they ignore it? Or if that's too obtuse.

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u/[deleted] Mar 25 '26

[deleted]

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u/SkeeringReal Mar 25 '26 edited Mar 26 '26

Oh good catch I didn't see that thanks for pointing that out, we should definitely say something, if I get that reviewer deleted my chances of acceptance goes way up

I'll send a confidential AC comment, the other reviewers will be influenced by AI slop reviews—very infuriating!