TMLR interviewed the authors of ten papers headed for desk rejection, and seven couldn't explain their own work.

The Co-Editor-in-Chief published the results: one team withdrew, one said they were unavailable, one booked a meeting and didn't show, three couldn't answer basic questions about the paper, three handled high-level ideas but fell apart on technical detail, and exactly one answered everything, at which point the interviewer found a major flaw in the paper anyway. 244 comments on r/MachineLearning. This is the first venue-level experiment I've seen that tests authorship by interview rather than by detector, and the hit rate suggests interviews work where detectors don't.