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ICLR 2020 - Call For Papers

27-30 April, Addis Ababa

We invite submissions to the 2020 International Conference on Learning Representations, and welcome paper submissions from all areas of machine learning and deep learning. 

Key dates

The planned dates are as follow:

  • Submission date: 25 September 2019, 6pm EAT (East Africa Time, UTC+3).
  • Reviews released: 4 November 2019.
  • Author discussion period ends: 15 November 2019 
  • Final decisions: 19 December 2019

Subject Areas

We consider a broad range of subject areas including feature learning, metric learning, compositional modeling, structured prediction, reinforcement learning, and issues regarding large-scale learning and non-convex optimization, as well as applications in vision, speech recognition, text understanding, games, music, computational biology, and others.

A non-exhaustive list of relevant topics:

  • unsupervised, semi-supervised, and supervised representation learning   
  • representation learning for planning and reinforcement learning
  • metric learning and kernel learning
  • sparse coding and dimensionality expansion
  • hierarchical models
  • optimization for representation learning
  • learning representations of outputs or states
  • theoretical issues in deep learning
  • visualization or interpretation of learned representations
  • implementation issues, parallelization, software platforms, hardware
  • applications in vision, audio, speech, natural language processing, robotics,
  • neuroscience, computational biology, or any other field

Double blind reviewing

Reviewers cannot see author names when conducting reviews, and authors cannot see reviewer names. We use OpenReview to host papers and allow for public discussions that can be seen by all, comments that are posted by reviewers will remain anonymous. The program will include keynote presentations from invited speakers, oral presentations, and posters.

Authors can revise their paper as many times as needed up to the paper submission deadline. Changes to the paper will not be allowed while the paper is being reviewed. During the discussion phase (between area chairs, reviewers and authors), edits will again be allowed; a pdfdiff will be done against the submission at the paper submission deadline.  Area chairs and reviewers reserve the right to ignore changes which are significant from the original scope of the paper. Like in 2019, Workshops will have their own organisation and call for contributions.

Submission Instructions

Papers should be submitted by 6pm EAT (East Africa Time, UTC+3)  on 25 September 2019 using the conference submission system at: https://openreview.net/group?id=ICLR.cc/2020/Conference

  • The recommended paper length is 8 pages, with unlimited additional pages for citations.   
  • There will be a strict upper limit of 10 pages for the main text. Reviewers will be instructed to apply a higher standard to papers in excess of 8 pages.   
  • Authors may use as many pages of appendices (after the bibliography) as they wish, but reviewers are not required to read these.
  • There will be an optional field to submit link to code at the time of submission. Code submission can  strengthen the review process and we encourage all authors to submit code as part of their submission. Please keep in mind the double-blind nature of the review process, so code that is submitted should not reveal the identities of authors. You can use any means to share anonymous code: one simple way is to share code in an anonymous cloud storage (e.g., Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive). If you are not comfortable sharing code in the public field, you can, after submission, make a private comment (to Reviewers and ACs) including a URL to your code.

Authors are encouraged to participate in the public discussion of their paper, as well as of any other paper submitted to the conference. Submissions and reviews are both anonymous. For detailed instructions about the format of the paper, please visit www.iclr.cc.

Style files and Templates

To prepare your submission to ICLR 2020, please use the LaTeX style files provided at: 

https://github.com/ICLR/Master-Template/blob/master/archive/iclr2020.zip

Reviewing Process

  1. Submissions to ICLR are uploaded on OpenReview, which enables public discussion. Official reviews are anonymous and publicly visible.  Anybody who is logged in can post comments that are publicly visible or restrict visibility to reviewers and up, ACs and up, or just PCs. In addition, the author of a comment can decide to post anonymously or not. Login is required before posting any comment.
  2. Authors are encouraged to revise their paper as many times as needed up until the paper submission deadline. Authors can participate in the discussion about their paper, as well as about any other paper submitted to the conference, at any time.
  3. By 4 November 2019, reviewers need to post their full review. Reviews are anonymous and publicly visible in Open Review. Once the reviews are posted, authors are free to upload modifications to the paper during the two week discussion period.
  4. During the discussion period, authors may address reviewer comments and make changes to their papers. During this period, a pdfdiff will be applied to compare new changes to the paper against the original submission. Area chairs and reviewers reserve the right to ignore changes that are significantly different from the original paper. In addition, during this period, any submission that is cited will be given an anonymous BibTex entry   
  5. After discussion there will be an internal discussion period amongst reviewers and ACs with the aim of summarising the review process, after which acceptance decisions are made. Papers that are not accepted will be considered non-archival, and may be submitted elsewhere (modified or not), although the OpenReview site will maintain the reviews, the comments, and links to the versions submitted to ICLR.

Dual Submission Policy

Submissions that are identical (or substantially similar) to versions that have been previously published, or accepted for publication, or that have been submitted in parallel to other conferences or journals, are not allowed and violate our dual submission policy.  However, papers that cite previous related work by the authors and papers that have appeared on non-peered reviewed websites (like arXiv) or that have been presented at workshops (i.e., venues that do not have a publication proceedings) do not violate the policy. The policy is enforced during the whole reviewing process period. Submission of the paper to archival repositories such as arXiv are allowed.  

To allow citation of papers that are under review at ICLR2020, OpenReview provides BibTeX entries that does not list the authors, but does give the title, year and url. Author names are revealed at the end of the conference. 

Withdrawal Policy

Authors have the right to withdraw papers from consideration at any time until paper notification. Before the paper submission deadline, if an author withdraws the paper it will be deleted from the OpenReview hosting site. However, after the paper submission deadline, if an author chooses to withdraw, it will remain hosted by OpenReview in a publicly visible "withdrawn papers" section. Like on arXiv, submissions to ICLR cannot be deleted. Withdrawn papers will be de-anonymized right away.