Rebuttals Move Peer-Review Scores, but Initial-Review Structure Bounds the Movement (opens in new tab)

Author rebuttals are the main post-submission window in peer review, but their effect on reviewer scores remains hard to measure because score updates mix rebuttal content with initial score position, paper-level consensus, reviewer confidence, and discussion dynamics. We study ICLR 2024-2025 using 73,000 reviewer trajectories with externally archived pre- and post-rebuttal scores, and use LLMs only as measurement instruments. Gemini Flash 3.0...