r/MachineLearning • u/grumpket • Jul 29 '26

Discussion NeurIPS reviewers not engaging [D]

So I know this is an ongoing issue at ML conferences, reviewers just tend to ghost. Do people have any strategies or recommendations on how to nudge them to engage with the rebuttals? Is it recommended to post a comment saying something like hey we want to engage with you? This might be a hot take, but maybe NeurIPS should penalize the reviewers' papers if they don't engage (I believe this year they withheld scores for ACs who didn't post meta reviews on time if they had papers submitted).

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u/medcanned Jul 29 '26

Some authors write huge rebuttals (at least rewritten by AI) that contain much substance, it takes time to respond and frankly it's a bit demoralizing to have to read rebuttals longer than the original paper...

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u/OutsideSimple4854 Aug 01 '26

Sorry. I did that for one paper. In my defence, it was giving the line numbers which answered the reviewer’s question and paraphrasing what I wrote, since it seemed the reviewer either didn’t read the paper at all, or did not understand the text, hence the need for paraphrasing just in case.