NeurIPS Fast Track Submissions into Phase 2

The notification date of NeurIPS-22 does not permit authors of rejected papers to submit by the beginning of AAAI-23’s Phase 1. In coordination with the NeurIPS-22 program chairs, we have therefore instituted a process by which authors can submit revisions of such rejected papers directly into Phase 2. This will work as follows. We will consider that revisions of rejected papers with *final, average* scores of at least 4.9 have satisfied the conditions of AAAI-23’s first phase and hence will accept them directly into AAAI-23’s second phase. Average score means we sum scores of all reviews that gave a numerical score, potentially including meta-reviews, and divide by the number of such reviews (i.e., not confidence-weighting). Final means the numbers that matter are the ones that come with your reviews after the rebuttal period, not the ones you saw during the author response.

The deadline for such submissions is September 16. To be eligible, in addition to supplying all of the information that constitutes a regular AAAI-23 submission, authors must also provide all of the following:

• The paper ID of the NeurIPS-22 submission
• The authors listed on the NeurIPS-22 submission
• The title of the NeurIPS-22 submission
• The original PDF submitted to NeurIPS-22
• All NeurIPS-22 reviews, including scores and all text
• An author response document describing changes made since the NeurIPS-22 submission. Authors can include a response to points raised by reviewers and are free to explain any errors they believe that reviewers made.

In order to submit through this mechanism, authors must explicitly give consent for AAAI to share all submitted information with NeurIPS to verify its accuracy. AAAI reserves the right to summarily reject papers for any reason, including because a submission (a) did not accurately disclose any of the information listed above (either by modifying it or by failing to disclose it, in whole or in part); (b) failed to name in the AAAI-23 submission authors listed as part of the original submission (when appropriate, new author names can be added to AAAI-23 submissions); (c) used a previous NeurIPS-22 submission as a “placeholder” to enable late submission of a AAAI-23 submission that is materially different.

AAAI-23 reviewers will not have access to any information about a previous NeurIPS submission or previous reviews until after submitting their own reviews; then, they will be given access to all of the above information except for author names and paper ID. Final decisions will be made based only on the opinions of AAAI-23 reviewers, SPC members and area chairs. However, members of the AAAI-23 program committee will be encouraged to update their own reviews to take into account points made by previous NeurIPS reviewers to the extent they consider appropriate, paying particular attention to points that were not adequately addressed in the author response.