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Guidelines for Use of Generative AI Tools

We refer reviewers to the ACM's policies on reviewers .

Disclosing submitted paper contents (even indirectly in the form of a draft of a paper review) to a non-confidential AI tool puts unpublished work in jeopardy and reviewers could be held liable for breaching confidentiality. Furthermore, the expectation for program committee members has always been to destroy copies of paper submissions they have reviewed. This, however, would be challenging to enforce when Generative AI / LLM tools are used.

Reviewers must therefore not use Generative AI / LLM tools to assist in any way whatsoever with their reviews.

General Guidelines

  1. Reviewers must treat all submissions as strictly confidential and destroy all papers once the technical program has been finalized.
  2. Reviewers must contact the PC chair if they feel there is an ethical violation of any sort (e.g., authors seeking support for a paper, authors seeking to identify who the reviewers are).
  3. Do not actively look for author identities. Reviewers should judge a paper solely on merit.
  4. If you know the authors, do not publicize the authors. If you believe you may have a COI with a paper you have been assigned, contact the PC Chairs. 
  5. Reviewers should review the current submission. If you have reviewed a previous submission, make sure your review is based on the current submission. Authors will be asked to document how the current version has responded to prior reviews.
  6. Reviewers should be thorough and polite in their reviews, with concerns/criticisms stated objectively so that authors can use the feedback constructively. Discussion of novelty should be supported with references to prior work.
  7. Reviewers must not share the papers with students/colleagues.
  8. PC Members must compose the reviews themselves and provide unbiased reviews.
  9. Reviewers must keep review discussions (including which papers you reviewed) and the identity of other reviewers confidential. Do not disclose the content of reviews.
  10. Do not discuss the content of a submitted paper/review with anyone other than people officially assigned to that paper in HotCRP until the paper is published. 
  11. Do not disclose the outcome of a paper until its authors are notified of the decision by the PC Chairs.
  12. Do not download or acquire material from the HotCRP review site that you do not need access to.  This includes accessing papers you have not been assigned.  Please note that HotCRP logs all user actions.
  13. Violation of the review guidelines can result in serious consequences, including but not limited to getting banned from submitting/reviewing in future years.