2025 Reviewer Guidelines

2025 Reviewer Guidelines Thank you for agreeing to serve as a reviewer for NeurIPS 2025! This page provides an overview of reviewer responsibilities and key dates. Contact Information The Area Chair (AC) assigned to a paper should be your first point of contact for that paper. You can contact the AC by leaving a comment in OpenReview with the AC as a reader.  (SACs and PCs will also be listed as readers, but will not be notified.) If you encounter a situation that you are unable to resolve with your AC, please contact the program chairs . Please refrain from writing to the program chairs at their own email addresses. Important Dates Here is a tentative design of the key dates (all in AoE) for reviewers. They are subject to fine-tuning if needed. Invited Reviewers Bid on Papers: Sat, May 17  – Wed, May 21 Check Paper Assignments: Thur, May 29 Reviewing: Thur, May 29 – Wed, Jul 2 [If your reviews are late and/or are not of sufficient quality, you could lose access to the reviews on your own co-authored papers, as our responsible reviewing initiatives indicate.] Author Rebuttal: Thur, Jul 24 - Wed, Jul 30 Reviewer-Author Discussions: Thur, Jul 31 – Wed, Aug 6 Reviewer-AC Discussions: Thur, Aug 7 – Wed, Aug 13 Author Notification: Thur, Sept 18 Main Tasks Fulfilling your responsibilities as a reviewer in a high quality and timely manner is critical to the success of the review process. Here is a list of key dates and tasks for reviewers: Preparation: Read and agree to abide by the NeurIPS code of conduct . Read our recent blogpost on responsible reviewing initiatives to understand our effort of building a healthier environment for authors and reviewers: https://blog.neurips.cc/2025/05/02/responsible-reviewing-initiative-for-neurips-2025/ NeurIPS 2025 is using OpenReview. Please make sure that your OpenReview profile is up to date. If you have changed or plan to change your email address, please update the address set as “preferred” in your OpenReview profile and confirm it. It is crucial that we are able to reach you quickly. We will send most emails from OpenReview (noreply@openreview.net). Such emails are sometimes accidentally marked as spam (or classified as Updates in Gmail). Please check these folders regularly. If you find such an email in there, please whitelist noreply@openreview.net so that you do not miss future emails related to NeurIPS 2025. Note that your assignments and tasks will appear at the reviewer console in OpenReview: https://openreview.net/group?id=NeurIPS.cc/2025/Conference/Reviewers Read what constitutes conflict of interest for NeurIPS 2025 . Bid on papers: Sat, May 17  – Wed, May 21 Your bids are an important input to the paper matching process. Unfortunately, in past years there have been a small number of reviewers who engage in deceptive bidding practices. If we have a reason to suspect that a reviewer is engaged in deceitful bidding to influence reviewing outcomes, we will request an ethics investigation, and malicious actors may be removed from future involvement in the program committee. Check paper assignments: Thur, May 29 As soon as you are notified of papers to review, you are expected to log in to OpenReview to check for conflicts and to check that papers fall within your area of expertise. If you don’t feel qualified to review a paper that was assigned to you, please communicate this to your AC right away. These assignments may change during the first week, as some reviewers and ACs request re-assignments. Please watch for notification email from Openreview. Write thoughtful reviews: Thur, May 29 – Wed, Jul 2 We know that serving as a reviewer for NeurIPS is time consuming, but the community depends on your high quality reviews to uphold the scientific quality of NeurIPS. Please make your review as informative and substantiated as possible; superficial, uninformed reviews without evidence are worse than no review as they may contribute noise to the review process. For example, if you argue about the lack of novelty, please provide appropriate references and point to existing mechanisms within. Please ensure to thoroughly comment on technical aspects of work rather than focusing only on paper organisation or its grammar. You can see the review form questions and guidance on how to answer each question in the "Review Form" section below. Make sure to flag any questionable papers for ethics review. These papers will be assigned ethics reviewers, who will effectively join the paper's assigned program committee. See the NeurIPS ethics guidelines . Feel free to use the NeurIPS paper checklist included in each paper as a tool when preparing your review (some submissions may have the checklist as part of the supplementary materials) . Remember that answering “no” to some questions is typically not grounds for rejection. In general, authors should be rewarded rather than punished for being up front about the limitations of their work and any potential negative societal impact. You are encouraged to think through whether any critical points are missing and provide these as feedback for the authors. Do not worry about minor violations of the required format (e.g., papers that exceed the page limit by a few lines), but immediately report any major violations that you notice to your AC. When writing your review, please keep in mind that after decisions have been made, reviews and meta-reviews of accepted papers as well as your discussion with the authors will be made public (but reviewer and SAC/AC identities will remain anonymous). This year, authors of rejected papers will have the option to make this information public for their rejected papers as well. Read author responses and discuss papers: Thur, Jul 31 – Wed, Aug 13 Authors will be given one week to respond to their reviews before the discussion period. At the start of the discussion period, please carefully read all other reviews and the author responses to all reviews for the papers assigned to you. As you read each author’s response, please keep an open mind. Even if the author’s response didn’t change your opinion about the paper, please acknowledge that you have read and considered it. To minimize the chance of misunderstandings during the reviewing process, we will allow for a rolling discussion with the authors during the discussion period.  If you need to communicate with the authors, you can make a comment visible to them on the paper’s page. Participating in discussions is a critical part of your role as a reviewer.  The discussion period is especially important for borderline papers and papers for which the reviewers’ assessments differ, and we hope that you take discussions seriously.  If your evaluation of the paper has changed, please revise your review and explain the change. When discussing a paper, remember that different people have different backgrounds and different points of view. Reviewer consensus is valuable—only rarely are unanimous assessments overruled—but it is not mandatory. After the discussion period, ACs will make initial accept/reject decisions with SACs before the Author Notification of Thur, Sept 18 . Your workload during this period should be light, but if ACs come back to you with additional questions, please respond promptly. Review Form Below is a description of the questions you will be asked on the review form for each paper and some guidelines on what to consider when answering these questions. Feel free to use the NeurIPS paper checklist included in each paper as a tool when preparing your review. Remember that answering “no” to some questions is typically not grounds for rejection. When writing your review, please keep in mind that after decisions have been made, reviews and meta-reviews of accepted papers and opted-in rejected papers will be made public. Summary: Briefly summarize the paper and its contributions. This is not the place to critique the paper; the authors should generally agree with a well-written summary. This is also not the place to paste the abstract—please provide the summary in your own understanding after reading. Strengths and Weaknesses: Please provide a thorough assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the paper. A good mental framing for strengths and weaknesses is to think of reasons you might accept or reject the paper. Please touch on the following dimensions: Quality : Is the submission technically sound? Are claims well supported (e.g., by theoretical analysis or experimental results)? Are the methods used appropriate? Is this a complete piece of work or work in progress? Are the authors careful and honest about evaluating both the strengths and weaknesses of their work? Clarity : Is the submission clearly written? Is it well organized? (If not, please make constructive suggestions for improving its clarity.) Does it adequately inform the reader? (Note that a superbly written paper provides enough information for an expert reader to reproduce its results.) Significance: Are the results impactful for the community? Are others (researchers or practitioners) likely to use the ideas or build on them? Does the submission address a difficult task in a better way than previous work? Does it advance our understanding/knowledge on the topic in a demonstrable way ? Does it provide unique data, unique conclusions about existing data, or a unique theoretical or experimental approach? Originality: Does the work provide new insights, deepen understanding, or highlight important properties of existing methods? Is it clear how this work differs from previous contributions, with relevant citations provided? Does the work introduce novel tasks or methods that advance the field? Does this work offer a novel combination of existing techniques, and is the reasoning behind this combination well-articulated? As the questions above indicates, originality does not necessarily require introducing an entirely new method. Rather, a work that provides novel insights by evaluating existing methods, or demonstrates improved efficiency, fairness, etc. is also equally valuable. You can incorporate Markdown and LaTeX into your review.  See https://openreview.net/faq . Quality: Based on what you discussed in “Strengths and Weaknesses”, please assign the paper a numerical rating on the following scale to indicate the quality of the work. 4 excellent 3 good 2 fair 1 poor Clarity: Based on what you discussed in “Strengths and Weaknesses”, please assign the paper a numerical rating on the following scale to indicate the clarity of the paper. 4 excellent 3 good 2 fair 1 poor Significance: Based on what you discussed in “Strengths and Weaknesses”, please assign the paper a numerical rating on the following scale to indicate the significance of the paper. 4 excellent 3 good 2 fair 1 poor Originality: Based on what you discussed in “Strengths and Weaknesses”, please assign the paper a numerical rating on the following scale to indicate the originality of the paper. 4 excellent 3 good 2 fair 1 poor Questions: Please list up and carefully describe questions and suggestions for the authors, which should focus on key points (ideally around 3–5) that are actionable with clear guidance. Think of the things where a response from the author can change your opinion, clarify a confusion or address a limitation. You are strongly encouraged to state the clear criteria under which your evaluation score could increase or decrease. This can be very important for a productive rebuttal and discussion phase with the authors. Limitations: Have the authors adequately addressed the limitations and potential negative societal impact of their work? If so, simply leave “yes”; if not, please include constructive suggestions for improvement. In general, authors should be rewarded rather than punished for being up front about the limitations of their work and any potential negative societal impact. You are encouraged to think through whether any critical points are missing and provide these as feedback for the authors. Overall: Please provide an "overall score" for this submission. Choices: 6: Strong Accept: Technically flawless paper with groundbreaking impact on one or more areas of AI, with exceptionally strong evaluation, reproducibility, and resources, and no unaddressed ethical considerations. 5: Accept: Technically solid paper, with high impact on at least one sub-area of AI or moderate-to-high impact on more than one area of AI, with good-to-excellent evaluation, resources, reproducibility, and no unaddressed ethical considerations. 4: Borderline accept: Technically solid paper where reasons to accept outweigh reasons to reject, e.g., limited evaluation. Please use sparingly. 3: Borderline reject: Technically solid paper where reasons to reject, e.g., limited evaluation, outweigh reasons to accept, e.g., good evaluation. Please use sparingly. 2: Reject: For instance, a paper with technical flaws, weak evaluation, inadequate reproducibility and incompletely addressed ethical considerations. 1: Strong Reject: For instance, a paper with well-known results or unaddressed ethical considerations Confidence: Please provide a "confidence score" for your assessment of this submission to indicate how confident you are in your evaluation.  Choices 5: You are absolutely certain about your assessment. You are very familiar with the related work and checked the math/other details carefully. 4: You are confident in your assessment, but not absolutely certain. It is unlikely, but not impossible, that you did not understand some parts of the submission or that you are unfamiliar with some pieces of related work. 3: You are fairly confident in your assessment. It is possible that you did not understand some parts of the submission or that you are unfamiliar with some pieces of related work. Math/other details were not carefully checked. 2: You are willing to defend your assessment, but it is quite likely that you did not understand the central parts of the submission or that you are unfamiliar with some pieces of related work. Math/other details were not carefully checked. 1: Your assessment is an educated guess. The submission is not in your area or the submission was difficult to understand. Math/other details were not carefully checked. Ethical concerns: If there are ethical issues with this paper, please flag the paper for an ethics review. For guidance on when this is appropriate, please review the NeurIPS ethics guidelines . Code of conduct acknowledgement. While performing my duties as a reviewer (including writing reviews and participating in discussions), I have and will continue to abide by the NeurIPS code of conduct ( NeurIPS Code Of Conduct ). Responsible reviewing acknowledgement: I acknowledge I have read the information about the "responsible reviewing initiatives" and will abide by that. https://blog.neurips.cc/2025/05/02/responsible-reviewing-initiative-for-neurips-2025/ Other Roles During the review process you