ICML 2027 Chair Seeks Ideas as AI Slop and Submission Surge Threaten Peer Review
Andrew Gordon Wilson, Program Chair of ICML 2027, posted on X on September 21 openly soliciting ideas for running the conference, directly addressing top venues' pressing problems: a flood of AI slop submissions and explosive submission growth, peer review in urgent need of improvement, how to incentivize high-quality original creative work, and how to reduce reviewer burden and bureaucratic overhead.
Confirmed
- Andrew Wilson publicly sought suggestions on X, covering the surge in AI slop submissions, review management, incentivizing high-quality original work, and cutting bureaucratic processes.
- Reinforcement learning researcher MarlosCMachado responded with a concrete suggestion: stagger ICLR's notification dates.
- Researcher tallinzen also responded with specific proposals.
- Zeeshan Zia proposed using SOTA LLMs at the program level to pre-screen submissions and desk-reject roughly 90%; he also revealed his team's actual practice of a "target desk (prospec…)" mechanism (post truncated, details incomplete).
Why it matters
- Submission volumes and AI-generated junk content are surging in tandem, reviewer burden is near its limit, and organizers actively turning to the community for solutions signals urgency.
- Proposals like LLM pre-screening with 90% desk rejection are radical, but they reflect some researchers' stance on automated quality gating and could shape future top-conference review workflows.
- Suggestions like staggering notification dates across conferences point to schedule coordination across the entire ML conference ecosystem, not internal reform of a single venue.
2026-09-21 ~ 2026-09-22 · 8 related posts
Primary sources
- [source] ICML 2027 Program Chair Asks Publicly: How to Handle AI Slop and Submission Explosion — andrewgwils · 2026-09-21
- ICML 2027 chair crowdsources fixes for AI slop; researcher proposes LLM desk-reject of 90% papers — ZeeshanZiaML · 2026-09-21
- ICML 2027 chair crowdsources reform ideas; researcher proposes deadlines ahead of ICLR notices — MarlosCMachado · 2026-09-22
- ICML 2027 program chair on AI slop: writing help shouldn't be punished as ICLR hits 60K+ abstracts — thegautamkamath · 2026-09-22
- ICML 2027 chair crowdsources fixes for submission explosion; proposal for AI-only review track — thegautamkamath · 2026-09-22
3 near-duplicate retellings: tallinzen · ZeeshanZiaML · wgrathwohl