ICLR reviewers question novelty after workshop paper's content surfaces in collaborators' arXiv preprint

On November 6-7, multiple community members (fanconic, BlancheMinerva, DanielCHTan97, etc.) relayed and discussed a dispute over authorship and novelty in an ICLR submission: a research team first published paper A at a workshop, then co-wrote paper B with other collaborators and posted it on arXiv, with B containing some of A's content. When the team updated A and submitted it to ICLR, reviewers pointed out that the novelty A claimed had already appeared in B, and questioned A's originality.

Confirmed

• Basic facts: Paper A was first published at a workshop; paper B, later co-written with collaborators and posted on arXiv, included A's content; the updated A, when submitted to ICLR, was flagged by reviewers for novelty overlap with B. This is consistently reported across multiple posts.
• The authors' position: the relevant content originated from this team, and the workshop version came earlier on the timeline, so original ownership should be theirs.
• The operational dilemma: how to clarify to the AC (Area Chair) that the content belongs to their own earlier work—rather than being plagiarism or duplication of others' results—while preserving double-blind anonymity. fanconic noted that in a similar situation, reviewers demanded a comparison with "another paper," which was in fact the authors' own earlier version retitled and renamed, creating an anonymity paradox.

Unconfirmed

• The posts present only the authors' side; the original reviewer comments, the exact publication time gap between the workshop and arXiv versions, and the AC's final ruling have not been made public.
• Whether the various posts (m1 vs. m2-m7) refer to exactly the same incident or similar but distinct cases cannot be fully verified from the material.

Why It Matters

• Extending a workshop paper into a formal submission is a common path, but if a collaborator rushes to post an arXiv version containing the same content, the original authors may end up "taking the fall" under double-blind review—exposing the current review process's lack of standard mechanisms for handling conflicts between priority and anonymity.
• The discussion (such as the exchange between BlancheMinerva and DanielCHTan97) also touched on how independent validation work should be positioned in a paper, and on compliant ways for authors to clarify with the AC—offering practical reference value for submitters at large.

2026-11-06 ~ 2026-11-07 · 9 related posts

• [source] ICLR reviewer demands comparison with reviewer-author's own renamed workshop paper — fanconic · 2026-11-06
• [source] ICLR reviewer flags novelty overlap with arXiv paper that drew from the authors' own workshop work — BlancheMinerva · 2026-11-07
• Workshop version vs. arXiv overlap: ICLR novelty dispute sparks peer-review debate — ruthstarkman · 2026-11-07
• Workshop-first paper hits ICLR novelty complaints: reframe as independent verification? — DanielCHTan97 · 2026-11-07
• ICLR reviewers flag self-overlap: reframing work as independent verification, not novelty — BlancheMinerva · 2026-11-07
• [source] BlancheMinerva argues withholding pre-camera-ready collaboration harms scientific practice — BlancheMinerva · 2026-11-07
• Double-blind quirk, not a priority dispute: BlancheMinerva on paper novelty clash — BlancheMinerva · 2026-11-07
• ICLR novelty clash with collaborator's arXiv paper: authors weigh disclosure options — BlancheMinerva · 2026-11-07

1 near-duplicate retellings: francoisfleuret