NeurIPS paper accepted with 5/5/4 scores, yet final review cites AI-use concerns

Rich-Mycologist-75 · reddit · 2026-09-25

A NeurIPS author shares a confusing outcome: their paper was accepted with initial scores of 5/5/4 and a positive meta-review, but the final justification was entirely negative, raising AI-use concerns and suggesting further investigation and reconsideration of the recommendation.

The flagged issue was trivial: one reference's author list had been copied over from an adjacent BibTeX entry — more a typo than evidence of AI-generated content. The author asks whether the final justification is written before or after the acceptance decision, given the mismatch.

The post highlights the risk of false positives from AI-detection tooling in academic peer review and inconsistencies within the review pipeline.

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