For one author at a top-tier AI conference, what is an appropriate number of papers to be involved in?
ICLR's answer is 20.
Recently, ICLR 2027 announced new submission rules, explicitly stating that any author can appear on the author list of no more than 20 submissions. Papers exceeding this quota will receive a reminder during the abstract submission phase. If adjustments are not made by the full paper deadline, the conference will randomly reject some papers until each author is back within the limit...
ICLR's explanation is simple: The number of submissions is growing too fast, placing enormous strain on the review system. Quotas are necessary to maintain fair and informative reviewing.
Behind this lies the "crisis" of submissions and reviewing experienced by ICLR 2026.
Data shows that ICLR 2026 received 19,525 valid submissions, with 13,763 papers ultimately receiving formal acceptance or rejection decisions. This involved 18,054 reviewers providing 76,139 review comments.
Compared to approximately 11,603 submissions for ICLR 2025, the 2026 submission volume increased by about 68%. This means the conference had to handle nearly 8,000 additional papers and tens of thousands more review tasks within a year...
The announcement sparked heated discussion online. Google DeepMind Visiting Researcher and University of Toronto Professor Dan Roy also noted this change and initiated a "petition" against the rule: Petition to abolish the 20-paper submission limit per author at ICLR conferences.
He posted on X:
"Limiting submissions to 20 per author at ICLR is absurd! It will also slow down AI progress.
Why 20? It's a completely arbitrary number. Today, AI Agents can conduct interesting, albeit incremental, AI research with minimal guidance. We should encourage everyone to produce and submit as many papers as possible, especially now that all reviewing is done by LLMs... Admit it!
Click the link to sign my petition!"
Clearly, Dan Roy is dissatisfied with the 20-paper limit, but is also subtly "mocking" the current impact of AI on the academic environment. The entire post carries a satirical tone.
For instance, ICLR reminds researchers that current AI Agents cannot yet independently produce a paper meeting top conference standards. With code assistants and research infrastructure improving efficiency, researchers should tackle more ambitious problems and submit more complete, mature results, reducing the flood of incremental papers into the conference.
Dan Roy has completely inverted this narrative.
Where ICLR wants to see more complete "slow science," Dan Roy pretends to advocate for "letting Agents produce as many incremental results as possible"; where ICLR tries to limit the paper "flood," he pretends to worry that "it will slow down AI development."
Especially the line "now that all reviewing is done by large language models... Admit it," also satirizes the fact that large models are not only involved in paper writing but also in the peer review process.
On this point, Dan Roy isn't exaggerating.
In late 2025, during the peak review period for ICLR 2026, renowned AI researcher Graham Neubig from Carnegie Mellon University, after receiving several review comments, sensed anomalies and suspected AI "watering down." He then used the AI text detection tool EditLens, developed by Pangram Labs, to scan and analyze publicly available review comments from the conference.
The results showed that out of 75,800 review comments analyzed, approximately 21% were highly suspected to be "entirely AI-generated."
This revelation caused an uproar in the industry and heightened academic concerns about declining review quality and "AI abuse."
Perhaps, in this "petition," the real question Dan Roy wants to raise is this: As the scenario of "Agents generating papers in bulk, researchers submitting in bulk, and reviewers using large models to complete reviews in bulk" becomes increasingly common, a simple "one-size-fits-all" approach like limiting submission numbers might not be the best solution...
What do you think about ICLR's approach and Dan Roy's "petition"? Feel free to leave your comments and thoughts below!
References:
https://iclr.cc/Conferences/2027/AuthorGuidelines
https://x.com/roydanroy/status/2083202134414102594
This article is from the WeChat public account "机器之心" (ID: almosthuman2014), Author: 关注AI的
