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icdm-author-response

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Use when preparing for the review phase of an ICDM (IEEE International Conference on Data Mining) submission - planning for a venue whose tradition is NO author rebuttal, pre-answering reviewer questions inside the submitted PDF and cited artifact, and, only if the current edition opens a response window, drafting a tight anonymity-safe reply.

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Source SKILL.md: https://github.com/brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills/blob/HEAD/ICDM-Skills/skills/icdm-author-response/SKILL.md

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ICDM Author Response

Prepare for the ICDM review phase under its defining reality: ICDM's tradition is no author rebuttal. Whether the current edition opens a response window is 待核实 (the ICDM 2025 call mentioned responses becoming part of the submission), so this skill has two modes — the default "there is no rebuttal" plan, and the contingency reply if a window exists. Confirm the current Research Track call before assuming either.

Default mode: pre-answer everything at submission

Because you may never get to reply, the submitted PDF and its cited anonymized artifact must answer the questions a reviewer would otherwise raise. Do this before the deadline.

  • Baseline fairness: state the tuning budget you gave baselines; pre-empt "you under-tuned the competitor."
  • Variance: report standard deviations over seeded runs; pre-empt "is this just noise?"
  • Leakage: state the time-respecting or edge-disjoint split; pre-empt "your split leaks."
  • Scale: show the cost curve and hardware; pre-empt "scalable is asserted, not shown."
  • Discovery validity: tie findings to known-truth injections; pre-empt "this is an artifact."

A weakness you notice yourself is a weakness to fix in the paper, not to defer to a rebuttal that may not come.

Contingency mode: if a response window opens

If the edition does provide a response, treat it as a scarce, high-value channel:

Reviewer pointResponse move
Factual misreadingCorrect it with a pointer to the exact section/table already in the PDF
Missing-baseline askReport the result if you already have it; do not promise future work
Clarity complaintAcknowledge and state the one-line clarification (fixable in camera-ready)
Fundamental gapConcede briefly; do not oversell — honesty reads better than bluster
Response skeleton (only if a window exists; keep it tight):
  R1: [concern] -> [one-sentence answer + exact pointer to existing evidence]
  R2: [concern] -> [answer]  (report only results you already have)
  R3: [concern] -> [concede if it is a real gap]
Rule: reference evidence already in the submitted PDF/artifact; introduce nothing that
would break triple-blind anonymity or that you cannot substantiate.

Keep any response anonymity-safe

  • The Research Track is triple-blind; a response, if it exists, must not reveal author identity, institution, or a de-anonymizing link.
  • Do not smuggle in new non-anonymized material or an external identifying URL.

What not to do

  • Do not plan the paper assuming a rebuttal will rescue a known weakness.
  • Do not, if a window exists, argue combatively or restate the paper; answer the specific point.
  • Do not promise experiments "in the final version" as a substitute for evidence reviewers can see now.

Vignette: the weakness that never got a second chance

A team knew their leakage guard was easy to misread but assumed they could explain it in a rebuttal. ICDM offered none; two reviewers flagged possible leakage and the paper was rejected on a doubt the authors could have removed with one sentence in the submitted PDF. The lesson: at ICDM, the rebuttal happens before submission — in the writing. The next cycle they stated the split explicitly in the experimental setup and the concern never arose.

Output format

[Rebuttal exists?] no (default) / yes (verify on current call)
[Pre-answered in PDF] baselines / variance / leakage / scale / validity - list gaps
[If window exists] per-reviewer reply drafted: yes / N-A
[Anonymity] response reveals no identity: pass / N-A
[Pre-submission fixes] <questions to answer in the paper before the deadline>