For the ARR May 2026 cycle, we had to make the difficult decision to increase the reciprocal service assignments for submitting authors. The reason for this decision was the substantial increase in submissions compared to previous cycles. In this cycle, we received 17,087 total submissions, with a pool of only 1,424 qualified area chairs and 10,636 reviewers. By comparison, in the January cycle, there were 10,518 submissions, with 1,415 qualified area chairs and 8,633 reviewers. The number of qualified ACs and reviewers is not growing in proportion with submissions. The histogram below shows the distribution of the number of submissions per author in this cycle.

In the March 2026 ARR cycle, we for the first time encouraged reviewers to try the experimental review support tool called REVAS. The instructions were communicated to the cycle reviewers, but we realized that we never wrote a blog post describing the initiative in more detail. We do this now, and apologize for the delay.

Starting with the ARR May cycle and continuing in subsequent cycles, ARR has updated the author and reviewer license agreements.

All authors will have to register as Reviewers or meta-reviewers (Area Chairs-ACs) on ARR (if you are already serving as Senior Area Chair (SAC), this is not necessary). Assignments will be made subsequently based on qualifications. The deadline for completing the registration form is January 7th 2026 EoD AoE.

From this cycle we intend to strictly monitor adherence to reviewing responsibilities.

As noted in the ACL’s Nov 29 announcement, OpenReview was notified on Nov 27 of a software bug that allowed unauthorized access to authors, reviewers, and area chairs. The ACL announcement details how any use of the leaked information may result in severe consequences. Thankfully, the OpenReview team was able to fix the issue quickly.