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Public story · 2026-09-08 · high
No human reviewed the rejections, and the same detector scored the three track chairs' own recent papers 24% to 69% on its own scale.
Why now: The field note breaking down the rejection scores is now public, and NeurIPS hasn't said whether it's revisiting the detector settings that produced them.
NeurIPS desk-rejected 178 Position Paper Track submissions, 18.4% of 969, with no human review or appeal, per a field note reconstructing the rejections. The 178 authors lost a submission cycle outright, with no path to appeal and no human reading their paper before the rejection.
Every rejection ran on the same detector's score. Seventy-seven of the 178 scored above 0.9 on Pangram's detector. Another 79 scored above 0.8 on papers with a single author. Twenty-two scored above 0.5 even though their authors had checked the box denying AI use.
The number itself moved depending on how the detector was configured. Pangram 3.3.2's default window settings flagged 42.7% of all 969 submissions in the 90-100% band. Shrinking the analysis window to roughly 100 words brought that down to 12.7%, a difference of more than three times from one parameter.
Independent researchers tested the detector by running the three track chairs' own recent papers through it. The scores came back between 24% and 69%, on the same scale that flagged the 178 rejected submissions.
The field note doesn't say whether NeurIPS has responded to the window-size finding, or whether an appeal process exists for the 178 authors.
Each link below shares sources, entities, or timing with this story.
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