Responsible Reviewing Initiative for NeurIPS 2025
Piotr Koniusz, Nancy Chen, Marzyeh Ghassemi, Razvan Pascanu, Hsuan-Tien Lin (Program Chairs)
Lora Aroyo, Francesco Locatello, Konstantina Palla (Datasets & Benchmark Track Chairs)
As NeurIPS expands, maintaining review quality and punctuality of the review process is increasingly difficult. While many reviews are thoughtfully written to elevate the quality of submissions, many authors have had experiences with late and low-quality reviews. Moreover, poor communication between the reviewers and the area chairs often delays the recruitment of emergency reviewers. Together, these problems threaten the conference’s long‑term sustainability. Therefore, for NeurIPS 2025, we are piloting new initiatives that will safeguard reviewing quality and timeline.
Submitting to NeurIPS Is a Partnership
As authors can see on the submission form, every submission needs to nominate a reciprocal reviewer from the authors. In addition, many of the invited reviewers also submit papers. Therefore, each submission fosters a partnership between authors-reviewers and the conference, emphasizing a reciprocal system where authors expect timely, high-quality feedback. Consequently, reviewers—often authors themselves—must fulfill their crucial obligation to provide thorough, punctual reviews. By setting an expectation on this shared commitment, we hope to reinforce to the community that authors’ professional participation as reviewers is essential to sustaining the high quality, high standards, and continuous success of NeurIPS.
New Measures to Safeguard Review Quality & Timeliness
To enforce our expectation that authors on NeurIPS 2025 papers should also be reviewers that will provide timely and high-quality reviews, we introduce two measures:
- Reviews Withholding Mechanism: Learning from the experience of SIG KDD ‘24/25, we are implementing for NeurIPS 2025 a policy in which reviewers who are also authors (and their co‑authors) will not see the reviews of their own submission(s) unless they will have completed all assigned reviews. If reviews are late, the reviewers (and their co-authors) will lose access to the reviews of their own papers until completion of their professional reviews (maximally until two days before the end of the authors rebuttal period).
Reviewers will receive several reminders before the reviewing deadline. Those who are also authors—and fail to submit their reviews—will be specifically alerted. That is, in the worst case, the negligent reviewers and their co‑authors will lose access to reviews on their own papers for the first five days of rebuttal. - Desk Rejection Sanction: Learning from the experience of CVPR ’25, we will reserve desk rejection at the meta‑review stage as a last‑resort sanction against grossly negligent reviewer‑authors. ACs and SACs will flag any low-quality review, such as placeholder ones, regardless of whether it’s submitted on time or late. The reviewer will be notified and required to address the issues. If significant problems persist and are verified by the PC chairs and D&B track chairs, the reviewer’s own submitted papers may face desk rejection during the meta-review stage.
Expected Outcomes
With these two new safeguards, we expect that a significant portion of papers will receive more responsible, timely reviews. Both the main track and the D&B track will adopt these measures. For this reason alone, we kindly ask all reviewers to think about reviewing as a partnership with NeurIPS that will improve outcomes for the whole community.