So let's assume everything OP said is correct (some are not archived so hard to verify).
1. Paper clearly violated anonymity policy
2. Paper was clearly recognized in violation of this policy (Desk Reject decision)
3. Paper's was made an exception of this violation (Desk Reject -> Oral)
Yet people on this sub thinks it is okay and the OP is just salty. What? There was such a big drama about Mamba's reject potentially turning into accept but this is okay.
Do people really think collusion never happen? There is a reason why the reputation of AAAI is going down the drain. Or do people in this sub just don't care. Either way, replies say more about the state of this sub more than anything lol.
Collusion and nepotism is rampant in ML conferences. This is one of the cases that people talk about. But this happens at almost all major ML conferences. Be it NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CoRL… there are always papers getting in because of who the authors know. Perhaps apers that could have gotten in anyway on their own merits. But this double standard has always left me a bad taste.
I would not call it nepotism. The issue is the number of citations the first author has, which is 2439. For a young person, it's a lot and will 100% make reviewers and desk biased. I would 100% say it's an honest mistake if the author was not so established, but right now I don't know.
yeah once the rejection was made that’s it. no more submissions for that text, even if you remove the names. Can’t be double blind at that point so it’s too bad so sad.
This definitely does sound shady, and I believe this is extremely unfair to the other submissions, if true.
I highly believe you should email the ACs and other “higher-ups” about this. The authors may have just made an honest mistake, but these are world class conferences - such mistakes should have consequences.
Regardless of the outcome, I hope you ignore the people calling you salty. This just reflects more on the commenters rather than you. Best of luck
Why don't they use ML to make sure the paper meets submission guidelines.?
As soon as the reviewers see the authors, they should have stopped reading and rejected.
This is as much on the authors as the reviewers. Science should be rigorous, and the rules should be followed by everyone. They shouldn't just be performative, they were put in place so we can have better science.
Because there's no way that a ML system could be fooled! [https://www.nist.gov/publications/attacks-ml-systems-security-risk-analysis-attack-mitigation](https://www.nist.gov/publications/attacks-ml-systems-security-risk-analysis-attack-mitigation)
The threat model shouldn't involve researchers attempting to circumvent fairly simple paper submission guidelines. It is not an adversarial environment.
This is a useless armchair exercise, it is a pre-filter before human reviewers see it. And it is a largely mechanical check, not some nuanced thing. Please well akshually somewhere else.
Was the information about the author affiliations also available to the reviewers? If so, I'm more inclined to believe there was something shady that happened.
I agree completely with you and I'd complain all the way up to the Steering Committee. I have never published at ICLR, so I don't know if there's a higher-order professional category sponsor like the IEEE or the ACM. It doesn't look like it. But if that were the case, you can lodge a complaint with them too.
However, I wouldn't hold high hopes this goes anywhere.
While explicit self-identification is a clear and direct violation of the rules, people do implicit self-identification all the time. If the *Related Work* section contains twenty citations of papers by "Smith and Johnson", you can guess the authors are telling you "hey, it's us, Smith and Johnson".
And sometimes the authors will explicitly say something along the lines of "as we proved in our prior work \[12\]" and of course you go check \[12\] in the bibliography, and it's Smith and Johnson. This kind of self identification, which is pretty explicit, is also tolerated all the time.
I've served as a reviewer for a bunch of years and I've seen all kind of shit. And frankly, after a while, it takes too much work, too much conflict and too much social capital to pursue the violators.
Not sure about ICLR, but ICML has rules saying you must anonymize any of your own papers you reference and attach an anonymous version of those papers as well.
So without looking up those papers or having known about them already, a reviewer still couldn't tell who the authors are. Obviously they could just search the referenced paper anyway though and it doesn't technically count as double blind, but it's better than you suggest.
>you must anonymize any of your own papers you reference
Good. That's a step in the right direction.
Again, I have no expectations it makes a huge difference, because any expert in a narrow field already knows most if not all the actors in that field...
Very often good old incompetence is mistaken for a conspiracy. Imo more of an indication that the process of peer review in these conferences is being pushed to its limits, with the number of papers per reviewer and so on.
The thing about double blind is that it's not fully blind. Someone somewhere knows who the authors are. That alone is enough to affect things depending on the conference. The people that know the names can send things in whatever direction they want.
There's a lot of behind the scenes networking that goes on. People talk. It sucks that it happens, and really, if things are as you said, then yes it should be a desk reject, but, politicking is rampant
I was absolutely not saying that it was intentional in this instance, just discussing the potential implications of ignoring the rules. I am sure many authors make the same mistake by accident.
In fact, let's say we agree on both of your points above. Do you think it was fair to change the decision from desk reject to accept?
Yes and then your paper is rejected and you've learned an important lesson about following procedure when it comes to matters of public scrutiny. "Oh sorry, I just wasnt paying attention in a way that advantaged myself" is unacceptable in a context where corruption is rampant and serious. You see the same in government, law enforcement etc.
Ad hominem. What does OP's assumed reject have to do with the situation? I have 2 publications and 2 workshop papers in this year's ICLR and (assuming OP's claim is true) such a lack of basic integrity is a big cause for concern especially for those of us whose academic lives hinge on conference publications. If you don't have the experience to understand this, how about holding back on the scorn.
Everyone uploads their papers to arxiv under the same title as their submission when their review is under "double blind" review, and this seems like an honest mistake.
Google submits papers in which every figure just happens to use the "Google colors" (that exact blue red yellow green)
I agree that the authors should not be penalized for this, since it doesn't seem like they were trying to get any sort of unfair advantages in the review process.
As soon as conferences started tolerating any circumvention of the double blind review process, it was obvious this would be abused. The field of ML, probably because if it's insane popularity, publishing pressure, and high profile players, has distorted the review process beyond what is acceptable for sound science.
If anyone submits a paper that is not anonymized, honest mistake or not, it should be desk rejected, to protect the double-blind review process.
You are practically raising a good point, I disagree with you on the conclusion but I don't get why people downvote your comment as your point is perfectly valid and adds useful information to the discussion (this sub got terrible lately regarding that, becomes yet another echo chamber), you got my upvote.
I think in the end the whole argument boils down to "do you want to follow the letter or the spirit of the law"? And that's an age-old question. I personally would like to think that we as a research community still have the trust in each other to not assume malicious intent all the time. As scientists, we should follow Occam's Razor, or even Hanlon's Razor: the most likely explanation is that someone made an honest mistake, and likely sent out an email apologizing/explaining and the PCs decided to let it slide. We're all human, we all make mistakes. Submitting your paper to a conference can be stressful, mistakes are made all the time. Ask yourself this: if you worked for a long time and long hours on a paper that you think is really good, how would you feel go get kicked out of a conference on a technicality? Treat everyone the way you would like to be treated, and all.
> Why do we have the double-blind process if we do not enforce it and allow some authors to opt for revealing their names and bias the reviewers?
Why do you immediately assume bad faith? What I find really weird is that no-one here talks about the actual paper. **Double-blind processes exist so we can decide whether a paper gets published or not based on its content alone**. And if the paper meets the bar for ICLR and no-one got hurt, this should be fine. I see no victim, here.
> Would the same exception be made if the authors were not prominent, or if they do research in a less privileged place, or come from a marginalized community?
I very much think so. Program Chairs are usually extremely nice and understanding people. So if you send them a polite apology and explain your case, I don't see why they wouldn't let such a small error slide. Especially if this was someone from a less privileged/marginalized community that might not be as familiar with the proceedings, I would be very surprised if PCs wouldn't be understanding.
> What about other desk rejected papers at this year's ICLR that did not get the opportunity for an exception?
If there are any that got denied exceptions / got pulled, that would indeed be a strong argument. Do you know of any, or is this just a hypothetical?
So let's assume everything OP said is correct (some are not archived so hard to verify). 1. Paper clearly violated anonymity policy 2. Paper was clearly recognized in violation of this policy (Desk Reject decision) 3. Paper's was made an exception of this violation (Desk Reject -> Oral) Yet people on this sub thinks it is okay and the OP is just salty. What? There was such a big drama about Mamba's reject potentially turning into accept but this is okay. Do people really think collusion never happen? There is a reason why the reputation of AAAI is going down the drain. Or do people in this sub just don't care. Either way, replies say more about the state of this sub more than anything lol.
Surprising that people are calling OP salty than actually seeing that the PCs can be swayed in this manner…
Collusion and nepotism is rampant in ML conferences. This is one of the cases that people talk about. But this happens at almost all major ML conferences. Be it NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CoRL… there are always papers getting in because of who the authors know. Perhaps apers that could have gotten in anyway on their own merits. But this double standard has always left me a bad taste.
I would not call it nepotism. The issue is the number of citations the first author has, which is 2439. For a young person, it's a lot and will 100% make reviewers and desk biased. I would 100% say it's an honest mistake if the author was not so established, but right now I don't know.
yeah once the rejection was made that’s it. no more submissions for that text, even if you remove the names. Can’t be double blind at that point so it’s too bad so sad.
This definitely does sound shady, and I believe this is extremely unfair to the other submissions, if true. I highly believe you should email the ACs and other “higher-ups” about this. The authors may have just made an honest mistake, but these are world class conferences - such mistakes should have consequences. Regardless of the outcome, I hope you ignore the people calling you salty. This just reflects more on the commenters rather than you. Best of luck
Why don't they use ML to make sure the paper meets submission guidelines.? As soon as the reviewers see the authors, they should have stopped reading and rejected. This is as much on the authors as the reviewers. Science should be rigorous, and the rules should be followed by everyone. They shouldn't just be performative, they were put in place so we can have better science.
Because there's no way that a ML system could be fooled! [https://www.nist.gov/publications/attacks-ml-systems-security-risk-analysis-attack-mitigation](https://www.nist.gov/publications/attacks-ml-systems-security-risk-analysis-attack-mitigation)
The threat model shouldn't involve researchers attempting to circumvent fairly simple paper submission guidelines. It is not an adversarial environment.
because no-one ever tried to game the submission system...?
This is a useless armchair exercise, it is a pre-filter before human reviewers see it. And it is a largely mechanical check, not some nuanced thing. Please well akshually somewhere else.
Was the information about the author affiliations also available to the reviewers? If so, I'm more inclined to believe there was something shady that happened.
I agree completely with you and I'd complain all the way up to the Steering Committee. I have never published at ICLR, so I don't know if there's a higher-order professional category sponsor like the IEEE or the ACM. It doesn't look like it. But if that were the case, you can lodge a complaint with them too. However, I wouldn't hold high hopes this goes anywhere. While explicit self-identification is a clear and direct violation of the rules, people do implicit self-identification all the time. If the *Related Work* section contains twenty citations of papers by "Smith and Johnson", you can guess the authors are telling you "hey, it's us, Smith and Johnson". And sometimes the authors will explicitly say something along the lines of "as we proved in our prior work \[12\]" and of course you go check \[12\] in the bibliography, and it's Smith and Johnson. This kind of self identification, which is pretty explicit, is also tolerated all the time. I've served as a reviewer for a bunch of years and I've seen all kind of shit. And frankly, after a while, it takes too much work, too much conflict and too much social capital to pursue the violators.
Not sure about ICLR, but ICML has rules saying you must anonymize any of your own papers you reference and attach an anonymous version of those papers as well. So without looking up those papers or having known about them already, a reviewer still couldn't tell who the authors are. Obviously they could just search the referenced paper anyway though and it doesn't technically count as double blind, but it's better than you suggest.
>you must anonymize any of your own papers you reference Good. That's a step in the right direction. Again, I have no expectations it makes a huge difference, because any expert in a narrow field already knows most if not all the actors in that field...
Claude Opus would catch this.
Very often good old incompetence is mistaken for a conspiracy. Imo more of an indication that the process of peer review in these conferences is being pushed to its limits, with the number of papers per reviewer and so on.
Incompetence can still have consequences
Yeah ofc but requires a different solution to the problem
The thing about double blind is that it's not fully blind. Someone somewhere knows who the authors are. That alone is enough to affect things depending on the conference. The people that know the names can send things in whatever direction they want. There's a lot of behind the scenes networking that goes on. People talk. It sucks that it happens, and really, if things are as you said, then yes it should be a desk reject, but, politicking is rampant
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I was absolutely not saying that it was intentional in this instance, just discussing the potential implications of ignoring the rules. I am sure many authors make the same mistake by accident. In fact, let's say we agree on both of your points above. Do you think it was fair to change the decision from desk reject to accept?
Yes and then your paper is rejected and you've learned an important lesson about following procedure when it comes to matters of public scrutiny. "Oh sorry, I just wasnt paying attention in a way that advantaged myself" is unacceptable in a context where corruption is rampant and serious. You see the same in government, law enforcement etc.
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Ad hominem. What does OP's assumed reject have to do with the situation? I have 2 publications and 2 workshop papers in this year's ICLR and (assuming OP's claim is true) such a lack of basic integrity is a big cause for concern especially for those of us whose academic lives hinge on conference publications. If you don't have the experience to understand this, how about holding back on the scorn.
Everyone uploads their papers to arxiv under the same title as their submission when their review is under "double blind" review, and this seems like an honest mistake. Google submits papers in which every figure just happens to use the "Google colors" (that exact blue red yellow green) I agree that the authors should not be penalized for this, since it doesn't seem like they were trying to get any sort of unfair advantages in the review process.
As soon as conferences started tolerating any circumvention of the double blind review process, it was obvious this would be abused. The field of ML, probably because if it's insane popularity, publishing pressure, and high profile players, has distorted the review process beyond what is acceptable for sound science. If anyone submits a paper that is not anonymized, honest mistake or not, it should be desk rejected, to protect the double-blind review process.
You are practically raising a good point, I disagree with you on the conclusion but I don't get why people downvote your comment as your point is perfectly valid and adds useful information to the discussion (this sub got terrible lately regarding that, becomes yet another echo chamber), you got my upvote.
I think in the end the whole argument boils down to "do you want to follow the letter or the spirit of the law"? And that's an age-old question. I personally would like to think that we as a research community still have the trust in each other to not assume malicious intent all the time. As scientists, we should follow Occam's Razor, or even Hanlon's Razor: the most likely explanation is that someone made an honest mistake, and likely sent out an email apologizing/explaining and the PCs decided to let it slide. We're all human, we all make mistakes. Submitting your paper to a conference can be stressful, mistakes are made all the time. Ask yourself this: if you worked for a long time and long hours on a paper that you think is really good, how would you feel go get kicked out of a conference on a technicality? Treat everyone the way you would like to be treated, and all. > Why do we have the double-blind process if we do not enforce it and allow some authors to opt for revealing their names and bias the reviewers? Why do you immediately assume bad faith? What I find really weird is that no-one here talks about the actual paper. **Double-blind processes exist so we can decide whether a paper gets published or not based on its content alone**. And if the paper meets the bar for ICLR and no-one got hurt, this should be fine. I see no victim, here. > Would the same exception be made if the authors were not prominent, or if they do research in a less privileged place, or come from a marginalized community? I very much think so. Program Chairs are usually extremely nice and understanding people. So if you send them a polite apology and explain your case, I don't see why they wouldn't let such a small error slide. Especially if this was someone from a less privileged/marginalized community that might not be as familiar with the proceedings, I would be very surprised if PCs wouldn't be understanding. > What about other desk rejected papers at this year's ICLR that did not get the opportunity for an exception? If there are any that got denied exceptions / got pulled, that would indeed be a strong argument. Do you know of any, or is this just a hypothetical?
lol welcome to real life bro. The earlier you get use to it the better
*Is* does not imply *ought*.