Just did an analysis on ICLR 2025 vs 2026 scores and WOW [D]

Reddit r/MachineLearning / 4/12/2026

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Key Points

  • The post analyzes ICLR 2025 versus ICLR 2026 review score patterns using reviewer-score correlation metrics drawn from OpenReview data.
  • It claims the correlation between reviews by different humans was about 0.41 for ICLR 2025, but observed a much lower correlation for ICLR 2026.
  • The author reports that score dispersion differs between years, noting ICLR 2025 has an avg-score standard deviation of 1.253 and ICLR 2026 has 1.162.
  • For within-paper human agreement, the reported metric is higher in 2026 (within-paper human SD 1.523) than 2025 (human SD 1.186), suggesting greater variability in review opinions.
  • The author concludes that acceptance/review outcomes may be “lottery-like” for many papers and expresses surprise at the magnitude of the year-to-year change.
Just did an analysis on ICLR 2025 vs 2026 scores and WOW [D]

Per https://paperreview.ai/tech-overview, the scores corr between 2 human is about 0.41 for ICLR 2025, but in my current project I am seeing a much lower corr for ICLR 2026. So I ran the metrics for both 2025 and 2026 and it is crazy. I used 2 metrics, one-vs-rest corr and half-half split corr. All data are fetched from OpenReview.

I do know that top conf reviews are just a lottery now for most papers, but i nenver thought it is this bad.

2025 avg-score SD: 1.253, mean wavg-scoreer human SD: 1.186

2026 avg-score SD: 1.162, mean within-paper human SD: 1.523

https://preview.redd.it/klay6nijipug1.png?width=2090&format=png&auto=webp&s=92c85470bc72ff03584f38f160d3d09f530b55e2

  • 2025 avg-score SD: 1.253, mean within-paper human SD: 1.186
  • 2026 avg-score SD: 1.162, mean within-paper human SD: 1.523
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