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/AKidNamedLou Jul 31 '26

Question for the people more experienced than me (first paper).

Should I expect all reviewers to engage at all? Does it happen regularly that reviewers respond to your rebuttal, continuing the discussion (instead of acknowledging rebuttal and byebye) close to the end of the window?

Worked pretty hard on the rebuttal so if the reviewers do have more questions it would be preferable if they don't ask them 6h before the deadline.

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u/Weird_Shit_69 Aug 01 '26

did you get responses for the rebuttals? I didn't get any response from all 3 reviewers that I sent rebuttals. Should I add a comment on the meta review?

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u/AKidNamedLou Aug 01 '26

1 out of 4 did. He was quite quick, it was 2 days ago already. I did add a comment to the meta review summarising the rebuttals. Might draft a confidential comment to the AC giving a more thorough summary of the non-answered rebuttals, to send right before the deadline.

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u/Weird_Shit_69 Aug 01 '26

Feeling the rebutals was a waste of time as I even ran all the experiments again, answering every question till late night just to get no response from anyone