brycewang-stanford AAAI Related Work
Use this to make the novelty claim robust under AAAI's broad AI review. The related-work section must help reviewers distinguish the paper from both archival work and contemporaneous non-archival work.
Positioning checks
- Identify the closest archival AI papers and current arXiv/workshop work.
- Separate method novelty, task novelty, evaluation novelty, and system integration novelty.
- Cite contemporaneous non-archival work carefully when it affects priority or reviewer expectations.
- Do not submit substantially similar work to multiple archival venues at the same time.
- Explain how the paper differs from AAAI/IJCAI/NeurIPS/ICML/ICLR neighbors in assumptions, evidence, scope, and contribution.
- Avoid using AI systems as citable scientific sources under AAAI policy.
Novelty paragraph
Use this structure:
Closest prior work solves <problem> under <assumptions>.
It does not address <specific missing setting/mechanism/evidence>.
This paper contributes <new item> and verifies it through <evidence>.
The claim is limited to <scope>.
Positioning across AAAI's breadth
AAAI spans search, planning, knowledge representation, constraint satisfaction, multi-agent systems, learning, NLP, vision, and robotics, so the closest prior work may live in a subfield your reviewer does not. Make the contrast explicit for a non-specialist instead of assuming shared background.
| Neighbor venue | Reviewer expectation | Differentiation to spell out |
|---|---|---|
| IJCAI | broad-AI overlap | what your result adds beyond their framing |
| NeurIPS/ICML | ML method or theory depth | why AAAI breadth, not just a benchmark gain |
| ICLR | representation-learning lens | non-learning mechanism or guarantee you contribute |
| AAAI prior years | incremental-track suspicion | the new assumption, evidence, or scope |
Reviewer-pushback patterns
- "This looks concurrent with arXiv paper Y." Fix: cite Y, state it is non-archival and contemporaneous, and name the specific setting or evidence you add; do not bury or ignore it.
- "Isn't this the same as your workshop paper?" Fix: clarify the archival delta and confirm no substantially similar work is under review elsewhere, satisfying the dual-submission rule.
- "Citation looks AI-generated." Fix: verify every reference against a real source; AAAI policy bars AI systems as citable scientific sources and hallucinated citations are a credibility risk.
Worked vignette
A reasoning-over-knowledge-graphs paper sits near both a KR archival line and a recent NeurIPS embedding paper. Using the axes: against KR work the difference is evidence (learned vs. hand-built rules); against the NeurIPS neighbor it is scope (logical soundness, not just link prediction). One contemporaneous arXiv preprint is cited as non-archival with a one-line delta, and the dual-submission box is checked clean.
Output format
[Closest work] <paper/system/benchmark>
[Difference axis] problem / method / theory / data / evaluation / system / impact
[Must-cite items] <archival and contemporaneous work>
[Multiple-submission risk] none / clarify / withdraw / reroute
[Revision text] <AAAI-ready related-work paragraph>