Category: Theory

Claire asked me to be on the SODA program committee this year, which was quite a bit of work.

I had a relatively light load—merely 49 theory papers. Many of these papers were not on subjects that I was expert about, so (as is common for theory conferences) I found various reviewers that I trusted to help review the papers. I ended up reviewing about 1/3 personally. There were a couple instances where I ended up overruling a subreviewer whose logic seemed off, but otherwise I generally let their reviews stand.

There are some differences in standards for paper reviews between the machine learning and theory communities. In machine learning it is expected that a review be detailed, while in the theory community this is often not the case. Every paper given to me ended up with a review varying between somewhat and very detailed.

I’m sure not every author was happy with the outcome. While we did our best to make good decisions, they were difficult decisions to make. For example, if there is a well written paper on an interesting topic which analyzes a flawed abstraction of the topic, should it get in? I would rate this a ‘weak accept’.

Here are some observations/thoughts about the process (Several also appear in Claire’s report).

1. Better feedback isn’t too hard. The real time sink in reviewing a theory paper is reading it. Leaving a few comments, even if just “I don’t like the model analyzed because it misses important feature X.” is relatively easy. My impression of the last COLT was that COLT had entirely switched from minimal author feedback to substantial author feedback. This year’s SODA was somewhere inbetween, depending on the PC member involved, which is a definite trend towards stronger comments for SODA.
2. Normalization There were very substantial differences amongst the PC members in what fraction of papers they wanted to accept, and this leaked into the final decisions. Normalizing reviewer ratings is standard operating procedure at some machine learning conferences, so I helped with that. Even with that help, further efforts at normalization in the future seem like they could help, for example in getting the decision on the paper above right.
3. Ordering There were various areas where we tried to order all the reasonable papers and make a decision based on the ordering. Where the papers are sufficiently related, I think this is very helpful, and the act even changed my opinion on some papers a bit by putting them in better context. Not everyone imposed the same ordering, because there are somewhat different tastes: Do you care about the techniques used? (A traditional theory concern) or about the quality of the result? (I’m more focused here.) Nevertheless, it helped reduce the noise. Incidentally, there is substantial theoretical evidence that decisions by ordering are more robust than decisions by absolute score producing an ordering.
4. Writing quality I was surprised by the poor writing quality of some SODA papers—several were basically not readable without a thorough understanding of referenced papers, and a substantial ability to infer what was meant rather than what was said. Some of these papers were accepted, which would have been impossible in a conference with double-blind reviewing.
5. PC size The tradition in theory conferences is to have a relatively small program committee. I don’t see much advantage to this for SODA. The program committe is small enough and SODA is broad enough that it seems dubious to claim that every PC member is an expert on the subject of all of their papers. Also, (frankly) the highest quality reviews from my batch of papers weren’t written by me, but rather by reviewers that I picked who had the time to really grind through all the nitty-gritty of the paper. It’s easy to imagine that a larger PC would improve reviewing quality by avoiding overload.