ase-review-process

ASE Review Process

Model the pipeline before interpreting any single review. ASE's process has two distinctive gates that authors from a plain accept/reject conference miss: an early-rejection stage that ends the process before rebuttal for the weakest papers, and a first-class Revision outcome whose criteria are fixed in advance. Getting both wrong wastes the little leverage authors have.

Process model

• Submission and review run on HotCRP with double-anonymous review: identities are hidden from reviewers, and authors reference their own prior work in the third person.
• Each paper receives multiple reviews scoring the significance and soundness of the automation, the quality of the evaluation on real subjects, threats to validity, clarity, and the Data Availability / artifact posture.
• Early-rejection stage: papers whose initial scores are uniformly negative are rejected before the rebuttal period. This is a mercy and a filter — it gives those authors a fast answer and concentrates rebuttal effort where it can change an outcome. If your paper survives to rebuttal, at least one reviewer saw something.
• Rebuttal, then a final outcome of Accept, Revision, or Reject.
• Revision is criteria-bound: instead of rejecting, reviewers specify concrete, actionable revision criteria and agree to accept the paper in principle if those criteria are met. Authors return a revised paper with a point-by-point summary of changes, re-checked (often by a discussion lead) against the stated criteria.
• Accepted papers appear in the proceedings in both IEEE Xplore and the ACM Digital Library; camera-ready compliance and artifact follow-through matter after the verdict.

Reading a decision against the categories

The strategic reading: write the initial submission so its weakest point is expressible as a revision criterion (an ablation you can add, a subject set you can extend) rather than structural (a tool you would have to redesign). The Revision outcome rewards papers that are one bounded step from done.

How ASE differs from its siblings

• vs. ESEC/FSE: FSE papers are PACMSE journal articles with a Major Revision round and heavy double-anonymity into the response letter. ASE is a conference (dual IEEE/ACM, proceedings in IEEE Xplore and ACM DL) whose Revision is criteria-bound but lighter-weight, and whose center of gravity is automation rather than broad empirical SE. Do not assume shared calendars, templates, or that ASE's Revision equals PACMSE's Major Revision.
• vs. ICSE: ICSE runs its own multi-cycle structure on the IEEE side; ASE's early-rejection + Revision model is its own. Never carry ICSE's cadence or page box across.
• vs. ISSTA: ISSTA has used multi-round reviewing for every paper within a cycle; ASE's Revision is decision-driven (you revise because you were told to, against fixed criteria), not a scheduled second read of the whole pool.

Who reads you

Expect automated-SE specialists: people who build analyzers, test generators, synthesizers, repair tools, and code models. They check whether the automation is sound and general, whether the evaluation uses real subject systems and fair tool baselines, whether claims outrun evidence, and they frequently open the artifact. A tool described vaguely gets caught, not skimmed.

Where author leverage actually exists

[Before submission]  area/topic tags -> reviewer pool               (largest lever)
[Initial reviews]    factual corrections, targeted evidence, clarifying a misread tool/experiment
[Rebuttal]           survive early rejection first; then move the borderline reviewer with numbers
[Revision]           the strongest lever: meet each fixed criterion, mapped in the summary-of-changes
[After reject]       no appeal; reroute to a sibling flagship or a journal

A rebuttal moves borderline papers when it corrects a factual misreading or supplies a number a reviewer said was missing; it does not move papers when it argues taste. In a Revision, a criterion that is neither met nor explicitly addressed is what turns the re-check into a rejection.

Misreadings to avoid

• Treating Revision as a guaranteed accept — the re-check against the criteria is real.
• Ignoring a stated criterion — silent omission of even one is the classic Revision failure.
• Treating the rebuttal as a debate — the PC discussion decides; your text is evidence for an advocate, not a closing argument.
• Forgetting the early-rejection gate — a uniformly weak first impression ends the process with no rebuttal; the first three pages and the evaluation table must land immediately.
• Projecting last year's cadence — deadline count and revision timing are decided per edition.

Output format

[Process stage] pre-submission / awaiting reviews / rebuttal / revision / final / accepted
[Decision category] accept / revision / reject / early-reject, with the criterion driving it
[Criterion map] each review point (or revision criterion) -> significance | soundness | evaluation | threats | clarity | data-availability
[Leverage plan] the next-stage action that can actually change the outcome
[Forbidden moves] identity leak (incl. in rebuttal/summary-of-changes) / unsupported new claims / ignoring a stated criterion