I am currently working on my response on the rebuttal acknowledgments for ICML and I doubting how to handle the strawman argument of that the method is not "novel". We were able to address all other concerns, but the reviewers keep up with this argument.
The issue is that our approach is mostly novel. We are able to outperform all baselines, and even a set of baselines which our method should not have been able to outperform. We achieve this through unexpected means, whereby we exactly could pinpoint the reasons why we could do this. Everyone in our field are surprised with these results, and says they are sort of groundbreaking for the field.
However, we were able to do this by combining existing components, which were never used in our domain. We also introduced novel components, but the reviewers do not care about them. Does someone know the best way to react to this argument?
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