Rebuttal Writing

Rebuttal Writing Skill

Metadata

• Skill Name: rebuttal-writing
• Purpose: Address reviewer concerns effectively to flip scores from Reject to Accept.
• Target Venues: NeurIPS, ICLR, CVPR, ICML
• Key Principle: Be polite, be specific, and provide new evidence.

When to Use This Skill

• When you receive reviews from a conference submission.
• When drafting a "Author Response" or "Rebuttal" document.
• To analyze whether a reviewer misunderstood a claim or identified a genuine flaw.

Critical Rules

1. Tone Management

• Never be defensive or aggressive.
• Always thank the reviewer for their time and constructive feedback.
• Use "We appreciate the reviewer's insight" instead of "The reviewer is wrong".

2. Evidence First

• Do not just argue; show results.
• If a reviewer asks for a baseline, run it (or explain clearly why it's impossible/irrelevant with cited reasons).

Core Workflows

Workflow 1: Rebuttal Generation

Input: Review text, Paper PDF Output: Point-by-point rebuttal draft

1. Deconstruct the Review

   • Split the review into distinct points (major vs. minor).
   • Classify each point: "Misunderstanding", "Valid Limitation", "Request for Experiment", "Suggestion".

2. Draft Responses

   • Misunderstanding: "We apologize for the confusion. We clarify that..." (Point to specific lines in paper).
   • Valid Limitation: "We acknowledge this limitation and have added a discussion in Section X."
   • Experiment: "Per the reviewer's suggestion, we ran Exp Y. Results in Table R show..."

3. Synthesize

   • Combine into a cohesive narrative if the conference allows a general response.

Learned Patterns (From Successful Rebuttals)

Pattern 1: The "I Agree, But..." (Agreement + Pivot)

reviewer: "The method is computationally expensive." response: "We agree that computational cost is an important factor. However, we note that our method's inference time is comparable to [SOTA] (Table 2), and the training cost is a one-time expense amortized over usage."

Pattern 2: The "Hidden Detail" (Pointing to Text)

reviewer: "It is unclear how X works." response: "We thank the reviewer for pointing this out. As described in Section 3.2 (Lines 145-150), X functions by..."

Style Guidelines

• Conciseness: Reviewers are busy. Get to the point.
• Visuals: If allowed, refer to new figures/tables included in the rebuttal.
• Structure:
  • R1 (Score: 6 -> 8): "Thank you..."
    • Q1: Response.
    • Q2: Response.

Quick Start Example

**R1 Q1: Comparison with [A]**
Result: We have added the comparison with [A].
Table:
| Method | Acc |
| [A]    | 85% |
| Ours   | 88% |
Discussion: Ours outperforms [A] by 3%...