Have you ever submitted a paper to a prestigious conference, only to receive a desk reject due to a minor formatting issue? I know I have. The frustration is palpable, especially when you’ve poured your heart and soul into the research. Recently, I stumbled upon a Reddit post from someone who’s going through a similar ordeal. They submitted a paper to the AAAI 2026 conference, but it got rejected due to a mistake in the experimental table – they used colors to show the increase in accuracy, which is against the conference’s rules.
The question is, will they get a chance to modify it in the rebuttal phase? The conference is strict about its formatting guidelines, but surely, a small mistake like this shouldn’t be the reason for rejection. The author of the post found someone who made the same mistake in another conference and still managed to proceed to the rebuttal phase. So, there’s hope.
This got me thinking – how many papers get rejected due to minor formatting issues? Is it fair to penalize authors for such mistakes? Shouldn’t the focus be on the quality of the research rather than the formatting? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.
In the meantime, let’s keep our fingers crossed for the author of the post. Hopefully, they’ll get a chance to rectify the mistake and showcase their research to the world.