Which Coauthor Should I Nominate in My 99 ICLR Submissions? A Mathematical Analysis of the ICLR 2026 Reciprocal Reviewer Nomination Policy

Zhao Song, Song Yue, Jiahao Zhang

Keywords: Reviewer nomination, Desk-rejection minimization, Author welfare, Optimization, Theory

Abstract:

The rapid growth of AI conference submissions has created an overwhelming reviewing burden. To alleviate this, recent venues such as ICLR 2026 introduced a reviewer nomination policy: each submission must nominate one of its authors as a reviewer, and any paper nominating an irresponsible reviewer is desk-rejected.
We study this new policy from the perspective of author welfare. Assuming each author carries a probability of being irresponsible, we ask: how can authors (or automated systems) nominate reviewers to minimize the risk of desk rejections?
We formalize and analyze three variants of the desk-rejection risk minimization problem. The basic problem, which minimizes expected desk rejections, is solved optimally by a simple greedy algorithm. We then introduce hard and soft nomination limit variants that constrain how many papers may nominate the same author, preventing widespread failures if one author is irresponsible. These formulations connect to classical optimization frameworks, including minimum-cost flow and linear programming, allowing us to design efficient, principled nomination strategies. Our results provide the first theoretical study for reviewer nomination policies, offering both conceptual insights and practical directions for authors to wisely choose which co-author should serve as the nominated reciprocal reviewer.

Primary Area: alignment, fairness, safety, privacy, and societal considerations

Submission Number: 8108