Strong Reject: The “Trust Me Bro” Moment of Reviewer 1, ICLR 2026

Head

We all love Reviewers. Reviewer 1, Reviewer 2, Reviewer 3 — whatever.

But what if the lovely Reviewer 1 gave you a 0 with confidence 5?

Neck

That’s exactly what happened to ICLR 2026 submission no. 21536 (See https://openreview.net/forum?id=tvDlQj0GZB).

Impressive! At least he didn’t use ChatGPT for reviewing that paper?

Or no. Maybe bro forgot to upload the PDF to ChatGPT when vibe-reviewing.

Body

The title of the paper is “Learning is Forgetting; LLM Training As Lossy Compression”.

Of course it was quite controversial. Just like how I write my blog posts.

But is it worth a 0? Not at all.

I read the work thoroughly. There’s nothing wrong in the paper that’s worth a strong reject. The literature was clear, the essay was neat, the math is justified (probably — don’t ask me).

But what is this reviewer doing????

Heart

And now let’s look at the peak moment of Reviewer 1. Even better than the 0.

Strengths: None noted. See explanation in the weaknesses. NONE.

Legs

Now let’s look at what the other reviewers gave:

• Reviewer 2: 2
• Reviewer 3: 6
• Reviewer 4: 6

Still a tough round.

But shout-out to the AC for accepting this paper.

Foot

Reviewer 1 probably wouldn’t want to receive a review like this.

So do I. And you.

So write reviews respectfully, justlike what you want to receive.

Done.