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ICML 2025 Area Chair Instructions

Thank you for serving on the ICML 2025 program committee as an Area Chair!

Immediate TODO items:

  • Please make sure you are available in the key reviewing periods, and are able to meet the AC deadlines (see key dates below).
  • Please read the entirety of the area chair instructions (this document), the reviewer instructions, as well as these fun and informative Peer Reviewing memes.
  • Please carefully review the ethical conduct and use of generative AI policies (below).
  • Please make sure your OpenReview profile is up-to-date, including conflicts of interest.

Responsibilities of Area Chairs

The responsibilities of an Area Chair (AC) for ICML are as follows:

  • Indicate your areas of research expertise, and “bid” on submissions to meta-review.
  • Check your meta-reviewing assignments and notify your Senior Area Chair (SAC) of any problems (e.g., conflicts of interest).
  • Check that each assigned submission is assigned four qualified reviewers, and adjust assignments as necessary.
  • Ensure that each assigned submission receives at least three high-quality reviews, each written in a respectful and professional manner.
  • Recruit emergency reviewers as needed.
  • Engage reviewers in discussions of submissions.
  • Carefully read reviews and discussions to write informed meta-reviews and make accept/reject recommendations.
  • Be responsive throughout the reviewing period, especially to your assigned reviewers and SAC.
  • Provide ratings of the reviewers for your assigned submissions.

Key Dates

  • Bidding period: January 27–30, 2025
  • Full paper submission deadline: January 30, 2025
  • Submission assignment period: February 1–12, 2025
  • Check/adjust reviewer assignments: February 7-11, 2025
  • Reviewing period: February 13–March 13, 2025
  • Deadline for reviews: March 13, 2025
  • Emergency reviewing period: March 14–24, 2025
  • Authors’ response and discussion period: March 25–April 8, 2025
  • Deadline to acknowledge authors’ response: April 4, 2025
  • AC-reviewer discussion period: April 1–April 13, 2025
  • Meta-review deadline: April 14, 2025
  • Author notification: May 1, 2025

Ethical Conduct for Peer Review

Members of the program committee, including reviewers and ACs, are expected to follow standard ethical conduct for peer review. In particular, ICML prohibits:

  • use of privileged information (e.g., information and discussions about submissions) for any purpose other than reviewing
  • use of Generative AI tools in reviewing (as described below);
  • all forms of collusion, whether explicit or tacit (e.g., an arrangement between authors and reviewers, ACs, or SACs to obtain favorable reviews).

Use of Generative AI tools (such as LLMs) for reviewing is strictly prohibited. In particular, reviewers cannot use Generative AI tools to write their reviews, and reviewers cannot input any content from any submission or review into a Generative AI tool. The same goes for ACs vis-à-vis meta-reviews.

Please also see the ethics guidelines of ICML 2025.

If you believe someone may be engaging in unethical conduct, please notify ICML via the Ethics Violation Reporting form.

All suspected unethical conduct will be investigated by ICML’s oversight committee. Individuals found violating the rules may face sanctions, have their own submissions rejected, etc.

 

Additional Details of the Reviewing Process for ACs

See the Reviewer Instructions for details of the reviewing process. Below are additional items specific to ACs.

Your Senior Area Chair

Your work as an AC is overseen by a Senior Area Chair (SAC). This SAC is your first point of contact for any issues that arise throughout the reviewing process. The name and email of your SAC will be visible at the top of the AC console in OpenReview.

Bidding

During the bidding period, you will indicate “bids” on (abstracts of) submissions that you are interested in (and qualified for) handling. This process is done within OpenReview. These bids will be used, in part, to help with the assignment of submissions to ACs.

Checking/Adjusting Reviewer Assignments

After submissions are assigned to ACs and reviewers, you will be able to check and possibly adjust the reviewer assignments for submissions they are handling. The reviewer assignments will attempt to balance a number of concerns, so please do not make more than two reviewer substitutions per submission. If additional substitutions are absolutely necessary, please obtain approval from your SAC.

Ensuring Review Quality and Rating the Reviews

Each submission must receive at least three high-quality reviews, each written in a respectful and professional manner. Please check the reviews as they come in for your assigned submissions. If necessary, you can ask the reviewer to revise their reviews (e.g., to add additional justification, clarify points or questions, adjust the tone/language).

(Emergency) Reviewing Period

It is likely that some reviewers will not have their reviews submitted by the deadline. Get in contact with the reviewers---ideally before the reviewing deadline---to ascertain if they will eventually submit their reviews before the author response period begins, or if you need to recruit emergency reviewers (perhaps yourself, if absolutely necessary). Use your best judgement or ask your SAC for advice.

Instructions for recruiting emergency reviewers will be given closer to the start of the emergency reviewing period.

Try to not end up with too many (say, 5+) reviewers for any single submission, as this can be a burden to authors. However, if you do end up in this situation, please make sure authors and reviewers know that authors cannot be expected to respond to all reviews. If possible, let the authors know which reviews should be prioritized, and keep this in mind when you form your meta-review.

Discussions

After the authors' responses are posted, make sure that your reviewers read them (and acknowledge that they have done so) by the stated deadline.

Make sure the protocol of the Author-Reviewer discussions is followed by the authors and reviewers. This year, we are limiting the number of rounds of communication between authors and reviewers. (See this blog post for our motivation.)

Additionally, encourage your reviewers to discuss submissions with each other (and with you) by posting and responding to notes on OpenReview (visible only to Reviewers/ACs). This is especially important if there are important contradictions between reviews, or if any key aspects of the paper remain unclear to a reviewer. AC-Reviewer discussions will not be visible to authors, so encourage reviewers to appropriately update their reviews after discussions for the benefit of the authors.

Meta-Reviews

Carefully read the reviews and discussions to make accept/reject recommendations and compose  informed meta-reviews. Each meta-review should summarize the key points that justify your accept/reject recommendation, whether from the reviews themselves or the (anonymized) discussions.

The review form this year is new and has specific items that reviewers are required to complete. Your recommendations and meta-reviews should be informed by the review form responses, as opposed to just relying on average (or other aggregate) numerical scores.

For example, this year there are no numerical "confidence" scores; such scores can be difficult to interpret and are not known to be particularly useful. Instead, we recommend using the responses to specific items, such as which aspects of the submission were checked and the reviewer's level of familiarity with the prior literature, in your synthesis of the reviews.

Please submit the recommendations and meta-reviews for all of the submissions you are handling by the deadline.

For the next week or so after the meta-review deadline, your SAC may reach out to you about your meta-reviews (e.g., for clarifications, possible adjustments/calibration).

Rating the Reviewers

Please provide ratings of the reviewers for your assigned submissions. This feedback is useful for highlighting reviewers who go above-and-beyond in their reviewing work, and also to identify reviewers who are consistently delinquent or shirk their responsibilities even after repeated reminders. (We expect the vast majority of reviewers to "meet expectations".) If you have any questions or concerns about providing these ratings, please ask your SAC for advice.