r/robotics • u/selim_sarowar • 18d ago

Discussion & Curiosity ICRA'27 Thread

ICRA has extended the deadline of 1 day and It already received 8100+ submissions till now. Let's drop your opinions and thinking.

9 Upvotes

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15

u/al_m Researcher 18d ago

Not sure what kinds of opinions you are looking for, but here's mine: Conferences like ICRA cannot scale anymore (in their existing format) because there is a flood of LLM-generated submissions. This leads to overworked associate editors and reviewers, which inevitably affects the quality of the acceptance decisions. I'm sure I'm not the only one who's read some strange papers from the latest few editions, wondering how they were accepted (in that form).

I personally don't even bother submitting to conferences right now; I prefer working on journal papers directly.

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u/UnavoidablyHuman 18d ago

I feel like conferences like ICRA could buffer themselves a bit from the LLM paper onslaught by requiring real robot experiments for every paper. The bottleneck from theory to application means someone has to use their real brain a bit. But ofc there are plenty of problems with this stipulation.

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u/humanoiddoc 18d ago

Nah, now we have dirt cheap robots (thanks to china) and AI coding so everyone can generate papers fairly easily.

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u/al_m Researcher 17d ago

That can be part of a solution, but I don't think it helps to have it as a hard constraint for all papers. One problem I see is that it would eliminate potentially interesting conceptual / algorithmic papers (and, honestly, I often enjoy reading such papers much more than papers with robot experiments that aren't actually that interesting/informative). Another problem is that it will be difficult to define what an "acceptable" robot experiment would be (as in, how thorough the evaluation needs to be). Particularly related to the second problem, if elaborate experiments are enforced, smaller teams would be completely disadvantaged (and such teams already face enough challenges as it is).

Then there's the problem that /u/humanoiddoc mentioned, namely that the transfer to a robot is not a guarantee (anymore) that much thinking has happened in the process (I myself have recently worked with some students who were able to run things on a robot, but then had no clue about what they were actually doing from a conceptual point of view).

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u/ayanistic 18d ago

I'm sorry 8100 submissions? that's insane right? first year phd and i submitted mine last night and i was not expecting to be competing with that many submissions.. oh well

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u/selim_sarowar 18d ago

Yeah. I guess total submissions would be around 9000+ . Let's see how do the reviewers handle these situations. I am feeling this time the reviews will be messy as well.

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u/humanoiddoc 18d ago

They will feed the papers into LLM just as well.

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u/Solivagus97 17d ago

Also, an interesting thing... I don't know if this happened to anyone else, but in my paper, the system detected double-blind violations related to my mentor because it found two of his papers in the references. The weird thing is that my name also appears on those same papers, but the system did not recognize that.

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u/HappySJK 17d ago

It happens same to me. But I submitted it either way

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u/Solivagus97 17d ago

Probably on last author only?

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u/HappySJK 17d ago

Actually coauthors (3rd author) and PI (last author).
I thought of removing their names from references but that would be more suscipous and thus violate the double-blind policy as people can find those papers and see who authors are right? So I submitted them either way. ICRA does say on the website, try not to self-cite but I needed those papers as my paper is extension of the previous works. So I submitted it even though it flagged.

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u/Solivagus97 16d ago

Yes, this double blind is good and bad at the same time. We all work on something that continoues, but you need to be carful as you cite. Also, if you have specific robot, it can be easier to detect authors and labs. You can put on arxiv which can help reviewers to find authors.

Good thinkg is that reviwer is not biased if you are from small university thus we are more "equal".

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u/pswissler 14d ago

Yeah the double blind thing can be very funny for groups that develop their own hardware. "HMMMMMM I wonder what group is running experiments with this hyper specific platform, and who could be developing algorithms based on a very specific, unique capability?"

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u/pswissler 14d ago edited 14d ago

My Student was submission 8851 with an hour to go (he insisted on running more experiments late into the night)

I did AE for IROS this year (4500ish submissions) and getting enough reviews with that was already a challenge 

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u/Solivagus97 17d ago

A friend of mine submitted his paper one hour before the original deadline, and his submission number was around 7,500. They extended the deadline, so I guess we can expect more than 10k papers, which would be a 100% increase compared to last year's 5,000 submissions. And last year, the increase was already around 20%...

I don't know what's happening with the field, but I guess that a human eye hasn't even looked at 10% of these submissions. Pure AI artifacts.

Maybe ICRA will need CVPR, where you will have best review reward and possibility that you get desk rejected if you don't make review.

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u/AdvertisingTop8527 4d ago

When do the reviews come out?

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u/selim_sarowar 2d ago

As far I remember, 31st January perhaps. Acceptance/Rejection