thedixitjain FAccT Author Response
Use this after FAccT reviews are released. FAccT has two distinct speaking turns, and conflating them is a common mistake: a short rebuttal for factual corrections, and — if you receive a Revise decision (new for the 2026 edition) — a full revision plus response that addresses Area-Chair-prioritized concerns and is re-reviewed. Both must respect mutual anonymity: nothing you write may reveal authors, institutions, field sites, or a repository owner.
Triage (both turns)
- Answer what affects the decision: relevance and framing, correctness, depth of exposition, honest treatment of strengths and limitations, and — often decisive at FAccT — the reality of the harm and the care taken with affected people.
- Answer each reviewer on the axis they raised, including the out-of-field reviewer. A legal or qualitative objection is not noise to be waved off with a metric.
- Correct factual misreadings first; a reviewer who misread a subgroup table or a consent procedure is often persuadable.
- Keep every word anonymous — do not name your system's real name, your institution, your field site, your IRB, or a private repository, even to strengthen a point.
Turn 1 — the short rebuttal
Short and strictly for factual corrections and misunderstandings, plus signposting minor edits. It is not a venue to re-argue substantive disagreement or to promise a new study — that is the Revise round's job. Concede what is true, correct what is misread, and point to exactly where the answer already lives in the submitted paper or supplementary material. Do not paste new results the reviewers cannot verify in the current PDF.
Turn 2 — the Revise-and-resubmit response (the distinctive FAccT-2026 move)
A Revise is a genuine revise-and-resubmit. The Area Chair summarizes and prioritizes the concerns; your job is to address that prioritized list. The response is a change ledger: for every prioritized concern, either make the change and show it, or decline it with a reason.
[AC.1] Prioritized concern (quoted briefly)
-> Action: DONE | added disaggregation by <group> (Table 3); reported the utility cost
-> Where: §5.2, Table 3; analysis/rq2.ipynb (anonymized)
[AC.2] Prioritized concern (from the legal reviewer)
-> Action: DONE | corrected the doctrinal framing per §2; the "right" is now cited to <origin>
[AC.3] Prioritized concern
-> Action: DECLINED (with reason) | the requested field study cannot be run in the window
without re-consenting participants; added a bounded limitation instead (§6) and an
Adverse Impacts note
The rule that turns a Revise into an acceptance: no unaddressed prioritized concern. A concern that is neither done nor explicitly and reasonably declined is what the re-review punishes.
Reviewer pushback patterns
| Pushback | What it signals | FAccT-ready response |
|---|---|---|
| "Results are aggregate; where is the subgroup harm?" | Disaggregation gap | Add per-group metrics with uncertainty; report the utility trade-off |
| "The proxy for the protected attribute is not valid" | Construct-validity doubt | Validate the proxy, report its error, bound the claim |
| "You speak for a community you did not study" | Standpoint/rigor objection | Add the community's data or scope the claim; note it in Positionality (at acceptance) |
| "The legal claim misreads the doctrine" | Cross-lane correctness | Fix the framing, cite the doctrine correctly, or narrow the legal claim |
| "This could be misused to justify deployment" | Adverse-impact concern | Strengthen the Adverse Impacts statement and the paper's caveats |
Anonymity in the response (easy to slip)
- Refer to your own prior work in the third person, as in the paper.
- Describe changes to released code/data without linking to an identity-revealing repository; use the anonymized location.
- Do not thank a named collaborator, partner organization, or funder inside the response, and do not reveal the field site.
Calibration
- Respond to the criterion the reviewer actually raised, not the one you would rather defend.
- The rebuttal is short and factual; the substantive work is the Revise round — do not burn the rebuttal trying to do the revision's job.
- Length and format norms for both turns, and the very existence of the Revise round, are 2026-new — confirm the current instructions before sending.
Output format
[Turn] short rebuttal / revise-and-resubmit response
[Priority issue] <reviewer or AC concern>
[Decision dimension] relevance / correctness / depth / strengths-and-limits / harm-and-ethics / discipline
[Change ledger] <prioritized concern -> DONE/PARTIAL/DECLINED + where in paper/artifact>
[Anonymity check] <no identity leak, no field-site/positionality reveal: passed/issues>
Source: brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills → FAccT-Skills/skills/facct-author-response/SKILL.md