Ojas Shirekar

I am an AC for ICLR 2026. One of the papers in my batch was just withdrawn. The authors wrote a brief response, explaining why the reviewers failed at their job. I agree with most of their comments. The authors gave up. They are fed up. Just like many of us. I understand. We pretend the emperor has clothes, but he is naked. Here is the final part of their withdrawal notice. I took the liberty to make it public, to highlight that what we are doing with AI conference reviews these last few years is, basically, madness. --- Comment: We thank the reviewers for their time. However, upon reading the reviews for our paper, it became immediately apparent that the four "reject" ratings are not based on good-faith academic disagreement, but on a critical failure to read the submitted paper. The reviews are rife with demonstrably false claims that are directly contradicted by the text. The core justifications for rejection rely on asserting that key components are "missing" when they are explicitly detailed in the manuscript. Some specific examples are (and many are even fake claims). Claim: Harder tasks like GSM8K are missing. Fact: GSM8K results are in many tables, like Table 2 (Section 4.2) and Appendix G. Claim: The method does not use per-layer ranks. Fact: This is the entire point of our method. The reviewer clearly mistook our method for the baselines. (Section 2, Table 1). Claim: The GP kernel is not specified. Fact: It is specified in Appendix E (Table 6). Claim: There is no ablation of the method's three stages. Fact: Section 4.4 ("Ablation Study") and Appendix J are dedicated to this. Reviewers have a fundamental responsibility to read and evaluate the work they are assigned. The nature of these errors is so fundamental, so systemic in overlooking explicit content, that it goes far beyond what "limited time" or "oversight" can explain. This work has gone through several rounds of revision over the last year. In earlier submissions, the paper usually received borderline or weak-accept scores. Numerous signs strongly suggest that some reviewers are relying entirely on AI tools to automatically generate peer reviews, rather than fulfilling their fundamental responsibility of personally reading and evaluating manuscripts. We strongly protest this. This is a gross disrespect to the authors. It is a flagrant desecration of the reviewer's sacred duty. It fundamentally undermines the integrity of the entire peer-review process. Given that the reviews are not based on the actual content of our paper, we have decided to withdraw the submission. We leave this comment so that future readers of the OpenReview page are aware that the items described as "missing" are already present in the submitted manuscript. These negative reviews for this submission are factually unsound and do not reflect the content of the paper. We cannot and will not accept an assessment that is not based on the work we actually submitted.