The author response is intended to provide answers to pressing questions by the reviewers, to point out factual errors in the reviews, and to appeal to unethical reviews. The author rebuttal is not intended to start a dialogue between the authors and the reviewers.
Please do not respond just to say that you don’t like something in the reviews. The cases where you can respond are the following: 1- A reviewer explicitly asks “pressing questions” in their review. Typical questions include requests to clarify or justify particular issues, or about important relationships to other works. 2- You have detected a factual error that could be used to recommend rejection. 3 – In case of unethical reviews, you can enter a confidential message, which will only be visible to the Senior PC Members, Area Chairs, and (Associate) PC Chairs. Before investing a lot of time in the rebuttal, please ask yourself also the question whether your answers have a chance to tip the balance. For instance, if there are four reviews that all recommend some form of reject, it is unlikely that the rebuttal will turn this paper into an accept.
If you are in one of the cases described in the last question, then you can write a response. For case (1), please provide the information that the reviewer requested, and nothing else. For case (2), you have to clearly describe what is erroneous in the review and why. Your response to (1) and (2) is limited to 1-page, using the template provided by IJCAI 2024 at www.ijcai.org/sites/default/files/Guidelines/ijcai24-authors-response.zip. Your response to (3) can be entered in a separate confidential box. Please notice that less is more and that shorter and more crisp responses have a higher chance of convincing the reviewers.
The PC members, Senior PC Member, Area and Program Chairs involved in judging your paper can see the pdf file, i.e. your reply concerning factual errors and responses to questions of the reviewers. Your confidential remarks are only visible to the Senior PC Member, Area Chairs and (Associate) PC Chairs, not to the PC members.
No. Before investing a lot of time in the rebuttal, please ask yourself also the question whether your answers have a chance to tip the balance. For instance, if there are four reviews that all recommend some form of reject, it is unlikely that the rebuttal will turn this paper into an accept.
The vast majority of the reviews have been submitted before the start of the rebuttal phase, with almost all papers receiving at least 3 reviews.
Yes they can. Despite our best effort to get all reviews in time, some reviewers are late, and we are sorry about that. If a review comes in late during the rebuttal period and you believe that it is important to provide an answer to this review, you can ask for an extension of 24h to submit the rebuttal by sending an email to pcchair@2026.ijcai.org
You may view a review as unacceptable when it is overly thin and uninformative. Senior PC members and Area Chairs are monitoring and also rating the reviews. In case reviews are overly thin and uninformative (as judged by the SPCs and ACs), they will either be expanded or not be taken into account. Other reviews may be added in such cases. You may view a review as unacceptable because it is unethical. These are the two cases where you can use the confidential box in the rebuttal.
All authors can submit or update the response. It can be updated as many times as you want before the response deadline.
Please make sure you are logged in with the Author role for your track. Your list of publications will be displayed on your dashboard. To view reviews, click “View.” To submit your author response, click “Edit” next to the publication, or “Edit Submission” if you are viewing the reviews.
No, you cannot. This is providing extra results or materials w.r.t. your original submission. At the same time, you can point out that — as sketched in our reproducibility guidelines — submitting code is not a requirement. Please point the reviewer to these guidelines
No, you cannot. New experiments are new results, they cannot be included. Furthermore, reviewers should not ask for this as the review instructions state that questions should not ask for new results.
Yes, you can, as this is not a new result, it is an explanation and clarification of what is in the paper.