Author alleges reviewer sabotage at IJCAI

Academic gatekeeping often bypasses official conference policies, placing authors in an impossible position during the rebuttal phase. IJCAI guidelines explicitly forbid both the request for and the inclusion of new experiments in rebuttals. Factual errors in reviews are a primary target for rebuttals, yet authors often fear aggressive pushback from "Reviewer 2." The confidential communication box for Area Chairs is the intended safety valve for unacceptable reviews, though its effectiveness is frequently debated. This incident underscores the ongoing reproducibility and review quality crisis in major AI conferences like IJCAI and NeurIPS.