Extended NeurIPS ED 2026 Reviewing Guidelines
We know that serving as a reviewer for NeurIPS is time consuming, and the community depends on your timely, high quality reviews to uphold the scientific quality of NeurIPS.
In addition to the following guidelines, all reviewers are expected to adhere to policies listed under “Everyone” in the Main Track Handbook, including but not limited to the NeurIPS Code of Conduct, the Anti-Collusion policy, and the Academic Integrity policy.
Flow of Tasks and Expectations
Your assignments and tasks will appear at the reviewer console in OpenReview
Preparation
Read and agree to abide by the NeurIPS code of conduct. Read the policies pertaining to everyone (e.g. around conflicts of interest, setting up an OpenReview profile) and authors (e.g. dual submission policy, double blind reviewing) in the handbook. Read about the 2026 experiment to better understand how reviewers use LLMs and how that impacts reviews.
Bid on papers
Your bids are an important input to the paper matching process. Please be cognizant of our anti-collusion policies (above).
Check paper assignments
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
Be fair and precise. Your review should focus on scientific content and clarity. Do not let personal feelings affect your review, and 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 – vague statements are unfairly difficult for authors to address.A good review is useful to all parties involved: authors, other reviewers and AC/SACs. Try to keep your feedback constructive when possible. Finally, please ensure to thoroughly comment on technical aspects of work rather than focusing only on paper organisation or its grammar.
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. 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.
Finally, be thoughtful. The paper you are reviewing may have been written by a first year graduate student who is submitting to a conference for the first time and you don't want to crush their spirits. In general, avoid wording that may be perceived as rude or offensive. Relatedly, 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); authors of rejected papers will have the option to make this information public for their rejected papers as well.
Additional FAQs:
Q: What about minor formatting violations?
A: While filtering for formatting violations has already been applied post submission, there still might be submissions that were not caught. We allow page excess of the paper limit up to 5 lines. Per the call for papers, submissions must use the official LaTeX style file (Microsoft Word is not accepted), and modifications to formatting (e.g., margins, font sizes, or page dimensions) are not permitted.
In addition, the main content of the paper must fit within the 9-page limit. The main content includes all core sections (e.g., Introduction through Conclusion, Discussion, Limitations, and Future Work). We allow Appendices to include Broader Impact, Ethical Considerations or Data and code availability statements. Submissions that violate these requirements are subject to desk rejection and we ask that you report to your AC.
Q: What if I’ve seen similar work in a NeurIPS/ICML workshop?
A: We allow work that has been submitted to non-archival workshops to be submitted to NeurIPS. To maintain anonymity, do not mention the workshop paper in your review.
Q: Can I recommend ‘accept’ or ‘reject’ all the papers in my stack?
A: Yes. Please accept and reject papers based on their own merits. You do not have to match the conference acceptance rate.
Q: Do I have to read the supplementary material?
A: You are not required to read it, but you are welcome to.
Q: Can I read the previous reviews of a paper if it is a resubmission?
A: You should not actively seek out previous reviews because it could violate anonymity in our double-blind review process, but if you have read them previously, that is okay.
Q: What should I do if I have already reviewed this paper at another venue?
A: Do not assume that the paper hasn’t changed. Read the paper carefully, and make sure you write a high quality review.
Q: Can I invite a sub-reviewer to help with my reviews?
A: No, sub-reviewers are not allowed. Conflicts of interest cannot be properly checked unless reviewers are officially in the system, and sub-reviewers would not be able to participate in the discussion, which is a critical phase of the review process.
Q: Is the use of LLMs or AI agents allowed in preparing a submission (authors)?
A: Yes, but authors must comply with the NeurIPS policy on “Author Use of Agents and Large Language Models” as described in the main handbook (https://neurips.cc/Conferences/2026/MainTrackHandbook). Methodologically significant or non-standard use of LLMs/agents should be disclosed in the paper. Authors remain responsible for all content in the submission, including ensuring factual correctness and avoiding hallucinated citations or results.
Read author responses and discuss papers
At the start of the discussion period, please carefully read all other reviews, the meta-review, 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. The authors may address some points you raised in your review during the discussion period. Make an effort to update your understanding of the paper when new information is presented, and revise your review to reflect this. 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. Your workload during this period should be light, but if ACs come back to you with additional questions, please respond promptly.
Contact for Questions and Concerns
The Area Chair (AC) assigned to a paper should be your first point of contact for that paper. ACs are the principal contact for reviewers during the whole reviewing process. ACs are responsible for recommending reviewers for submissions, ensuring that all submissions receive quality reviews, facilitating discussions among reviewers, writing meta-reviews, evaluating the quality of reviews, and making decision recommendations. In addition to questions about reviewing, you should also contact your AC if you suspect notice any unethical or suspect behavior e.g. plagiarism, papers that are not anonymized (note: if someone pressures you to provide a positive or negative review, please escalate that to the scientific integrity chairs right away). Your AC is also your first point of contact if you have an emergency and are delayed in reviews.
Finally, if you have ethics-related concerns regarding the content of the paper, you may flag the submission for additional review by ethics reviewers. The comments from the ethics reviewers will be visible to all reviewers, the AC, and the authors. You may use their comments to inform your deliberations.
You can contact the AC by leaving a comment in OpenReview with the AC as a reader. (SACs – whose job it is to oversee the work of ACs – and track Chairs – who oversee the entire process – 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 Chairs. Please refrain from writing to the Track Chairs at their own email addresses.
Executing Code & Clicking on Links
Please remember that just like any other untrusted code, any submitted code may contain security vulnerabilities. When running any submitted code, please make sure you are doing this in a secure environment because this code is not vetted by our submission system. We recommend running source code (1) inside a Docker container, or (2) a Virtual Machine image (using VirtualBox or VMWare), or (3) on a network-isolated cloud instance. You may wish to also be cautious about accessing other web links provided from the paper, as these may contain vulnerabilities or may log visitor IP addresses.
Double-blind Reviewing: For Reviewers
Please do not attempt to find out the identities of the authors for any of your assigned submissions (e.g., by searching on arXiv). This would constitute an active violation of the double-blind reviewing policy.
Note that the ED track allows signle-blind in cases of dataset-centered submissions where anonymizing the data release is unfeasible due to scientific or ethical concerns. This applies to dataset and code URLs.