Do Some Research Areas Get an Easier Accept? The Quiet Biases Hiding in ICLR's Peer Review

Peer review is supposed to reward merit and novel research, but the data suggests the playing field at the Top AI conferences isn’t perfectly level. Using public review metadata from major AI conferences (e.g., ICLR), I compare acceptance rates across research areas, and check whether differences persist even at similar review scores. What do we find; some fields have a small bias towards…