Accept More, Reject Less: Reducing up to 19% Unnecessary Desk-Rejections over 11 Years of ICLR Data

TL;DR

This paper proposes a linear programming-based algorithm to reduce unnecessary desk rejections at AI conferences, preserving more valuable submissions while respecting author limits, based on 11 years of ICLR data.

Contribution

It introduces a novel optimization approach for conference desk-rejection policies, significantly decreasing unwarranted rejections without violating submission constraints.

Findings

Preserves up to 19.23% more papers

Efficient computation within 54 seconds on real data

Applicable to large-scale conference submission policies

Abstract

The explosive growth of AI research has driven paper submissions at flagship AI conferences to unprecedented levels, necessitating many venues in 2025 (e.g., CVPR, ICCV, KDD, AAAI, IJCAI, WSDM) to enforce strict per-author submission limits and to desk-reject any excess papers by simple ID order. While this policy helps reduce reviewer workload, it may unintentionally discard valuable papers and penalize authors' efforts. In this paper, we ask an essential research question on whether it is possible to follow submission limits while minimizing needless rejections. We first formalize the current desk-rejection policies as an optimization problem, and then develop a practical algorithm based on linear programming relaxation and a rounding scheme. Under extensive evaluation on 11 years of real-world ICLR (International Conference on Learning Representations) data, our method preserves up to $19.23\%$ more papers without violating any author limits. Moreover, our algorithm is highly efficient in practice, with all results on ICLR data computed within at most 53.64 seconds. Our work provides a simple and practical desk-rejection strategy that significantly reduces unnecessary rejections, demonstrating strong potential to improve current CS conference submission policies.