ijcai-experiments

IJCAI Experiments

Use this before submission when the experimental story is not yet locked. IJCAI reviewers

can score novelty, correctness, clarity, significance, impact, presentation, ethics, and

reproducibility.

Experiment audit

• Map each major claim to a table, figure, theorem, ablation, proof, or qualitative analysis.
• Include strong, current, and properly tuned baselines; explain any missing baseline before

reviewers ask.

• Report dataset splits, preprocessing, metrics, search ranges, final hyperparameters,

selection criteria, random seeds or repeats, and compute infrastructure.

• Add ablations for the core mechanism, not just peripheral architecture choices.
• Use uncertainty estimates, paired tests, confidence intervals, or repeated runs when small

differences could change the conclusion.

• For sensitive data or human-facing systems, document privacy, consent, copyright, safety,

fairness, misuse, and deployment limits.

• Keep enough details in the main paper for credible reproduction even if reviewers ignore

the supplementary material.

What IJCAI reviewers score the evidence on

IJCAI draws reviewers from symbolic AI, search, planning, constraint satisfaction, KR,

multi-agent systems, game theory, ML, NLP, and vision, so the experimental section must read

across subcommunities. Calibrate evidence to the claim type rather than copying an ML-only

template.

| Contribution type | Decisive evidence | Common reject trigger |

| --- | --- | --- |

| Search / planning | Coverage, anytime quality, expansion counts, time/memory cutoffs, per-domain breakdown | Single suite, no domain table, missing strong planner baseline |

| Constraint / SAT | Cactus plots, instances within timeout, solver versions | No virtual-best comparison |

| Multi-agent / game theory | Welfare/equilibrium metrics, agent-count scaling, seeds | Claims hold at one population size only |

| Learning method | Strong current baselines, core-mechanism ablations, variance | Cherry-picked seeds, weak baselines |

| Theory-plus-experiment | Experiments confirming the proven bound | Empirics outside the theorem's regime |

Worked vignette: a heuristic-search paper

A submission proposes a learned heuristic for cost-optimal classical planning and reports a

single aggregate "12% fewer expansions" number. Apply the decision rules:

1. Evidence and baseline: replace the single mean with a per-domain coverage and expansion

table, and add a strong admissible-heuristic baseline that shows optimality is preserved.

1. Core ablation: isolate the learned component from the search framework so the gain is not

credited to engineering, and report multiple training seeds since the heuristic is stochastic.

1. Compute: state the planner, time and memory limits, and machine, since coverage is

meaningless without a stated timeout.

Reviewer pushback and the venue-specific fix

• "Only one benchmark family." Add a second problem class or justify the scope; an IJCAI

cross-section reviewer distrusts single-suite claims.

• "Baseline is outdated." Cite and run a current top method; the broad PC notices stale

comparisons.

• "Gains are within noise." Provide repeats, paired tests, or confidence intervals before the

response, since no new results may be added later.

Output format

[Experiment readiness] strong / adequate / weak
[Claim -> evidence map] <claim: section/table/figure>
[Missing baseline or ablation] <item>
[Reproducibility gaps] <hyperparameters/seeds/compute/data/code>
[Decision-critical next run] <one experiment>