The AAAI 2026 review form, explained

How AAAI reviewers read your paper

AAAI reviewers assess the paper's story (problem, limits of the state of the art, whether results support the claims, key novelty), presentation (soundness, clarity, unstated assumptions, reproducibility, limitations), related work, and evaluations (baselines, metrics, datasets, error analysis), separating essential from optional revisions. Reviews must be depersonalized and must not duplicate content from other reviews, including AAAI's own AI review. Review is two-phase: papers with clearly negative Phase-1 ratings are rejected before author feedback.

• Depersonalize: avoid "I", "you" and "the authors"; write "the paper" or "this reviewer".
• Professional and respectful.
• Separate essential revisions from optional suggestions.

Where the bar sits. AAAI-26 accepted 17.6% of 23,680 submissions, and Phase 1 removes many papers before author feedback. No public score statistics; rough rule: mean ≥ 5 (of 8) needed to be competitive.

The reviewer form, field by field

In the order reviewers see it, with every score and its official wording.

1. 01

   Summary

   Free text

   The main claims and contributions of the paper.

2. 02

   Strengths

   List of points

   Part of “Strengths And Weaknesses” on the official form.

   Cover the story (problem, limits of the state of the art, key novel contribution), presentation, placement in related work, and evaluation.

3. 03

   Weaknesses

   List of points

   Part of “Strengths And Weaknesses” on the official form.

   Do the results support the claims? Unstated assumptions, missing reproducibility detail, missing related work, weak baselines/metrics/datasets/error analysis. Separate essential revisions from optional ones.

4. 04

   Questions For The Authors

   List of points

   Questions whose answers could change the evaluation. These feed the single author-feedback window.

5. 05

   Significance Of The Problem

   Score · 1–4

   Excellent / Good / Fair / Poor.

   1. 4excellent
   2. 3good
   3. 2fair
   4. 1poor
6. 06

   Justification Of Approach

   Score · 1–4

   Excellent / Good / Fair / Poor.

   1. 4excellent
   2. 3good
   3. 2fair
   4. 1poor
7. 07

   Quality Of Evaluation

   Score · 1–4

   Excellent / Good / Fair / Poor.

   1. 4excellent
   2. 3good
   3. 2fair
   4. 1poor
8. 08

   Reproducibility And Facilitation Of Follow Up Work

   Score · 1–4

   Excellent / Good / Fair / Poor.

   1. 4excellent
   2. 3good
   3. 2fair
   4. 1poor
9. 09

   Ethical Considerations

   Free text

   Responsible research practice: human subjects, sensitive data, bias. "None" if not applicable.

10. 10

    Overall Evaluation

    Score · 1–8

    Overall recommendation on AAAI's eight-point scale.

    Score	Meaning
    8	Strong accept (top 5% of accepted papers)
    7	Accept (top 15% of accepted papers)
    6	Weak accept
    5	Borderline accept
    4	Borderline reject
    3	Weak reject
    2	Reject
    1	Strong reject

11. 11

    Confidence

    Score · 1–5

    How certain you are about your assessment.

    Score	Meaning
    5	You are absolutely certain about your assessment. You are very familiar with the related work and checked the math/other details carefully.
    4	You are confident in your assessment, but not absolutely certain. It is unlikely, but not impossible, that you did not understand some parts of the submission or that you are unfamiliar with some pieces of related work.
    3	You are fairly confident in your assessment. It is possible that you did not understand some parts of the submission or that you are unfamiliar with some pieces of related work. Math/other details were not carefully checked.
    2	You are willing to defend your assessment, but it is quite likely that you did not understand the central parts of the submission or that you are unfamiliar with some pieces of related work. Math/other details were not carefully checked.
    1	Your assessment is an educated guess. The submission is not in your area or the submission was difficult to understand. Math/other details were not carefully checked.

Area chair meta-review

AAAI SPCs write the meta-review and the AC confirms the decision.

• Accept
• Reject

AAAI Reproducibility Checklist

Reviewers check these. Gaps are easy points to lose.

1. General: motivation, contributions and pedagogical references clearly stated
2. Theory: all assumptions stated and complete proofs provided
3. Datasets: new datasets described and released (or reasons given); licensing of existing datasets
4. Code: source code for experiments released or will be released
5. Experiments: random seeds, hardware, hyperparameters and their selection reported
6. Experiments: evaluation metrics motivated; statistical significance / variance reported
7. Page limit: 7 pages of content plus up to 2 pages of references

Policy on LLMs in reviewing