arXiv AI By Feilian Huang

The Review Lottery: Benchmarking an Observational Estimator of Peer-Review Noise (ICLR 2017-2025)

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The paper introduces an observational estimator to quantify how much peer‑review decisions would change if a paper were reviewed by a different set of reviewers, using public review data from ICLR 2017‑2025. The estimator decomposes scores into paper quality and reviewer noise via a Bayesian ordered‑probit model, maps scores to decisions with a logistic model, and simulates independent committees to estimate disagreement rates, finding 23‑30% disagreement at committee size two and 18‑24% at size four. Calibration against NeurIPS 2021 data shows close agreement, and longitudinal analysis reveals no robust trend in reviewer noise over the period, though specific years (2020, 2021) exhibit higher flip rates due to scale compression and low signal‑to‑noise. whyItMatters":"The study provides a scalable, data‑driven method to assess the reliability of conference accept/reject decisions, offering insights into reviewer noise and potential improvements in review processes."

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