ICBINB-BIONeurIPS Workshop 2026

Reviewer Guidelines

Thank you for agreeing to serve as a reviewer for ICBINB-BIO: I Can't Believe It's Not Better: Failure Modes of AI in Biology at NeurIPS 2026. Your role is essential in ensuring a high-quality and impactful program, and we appreciate your time and effort in providing thorough and constructive feedback. If you want to be part of the program committee, please fill this form.

Reviewer responsibilities

As a reviewer, we ask that you:

  • Submit timely, substantive, and constructive reviews.
  • Adhere to the reviewing guidelines outlined below.
  • Evaluate the work in the context of its biological task and data.
  • Separate predictive evidence from mechanistic or deployment claims.
  • Declare conflicts and protect double-blind confidentiality.
  • Follow the NeurIPS Code of Ethics and Code of Conduct when assessing submissions.

Main reviewer tasks and timeline


The key tasks are:
  1. Create or update your OpenReview profile. Ensure your profile lists your most recent publications. If you do not yet have an OpenReview profile, register with the email address that received the reviewer invitation.
  2. Conduct a thorough review. Provide clear, constructive, and detailed feedback, evaluating submissions on clarity, problem statement, biological faithfulness, and relevance to the workshop theme. We accept two submission types: full papers (up to eight pages) and tiny papers (up to four pages), excluding references and appendices. Reviewers are not required to read the appendix, but may consult it if helpful.
  3. Provide a final recommendation. Submit your final review and overall assessment by the end of the review period (refer to the homepage). If you expect not to finish before the deadline, please contact us at icbinbbio@gmail.com.
  4. Nominate papers for awards. Indicate whether a paper should be considered for the Entropic Award (most surprising negative result) or the Didactic Award (most well-explained and pedagogical paper).

Reviewing a submission: step-by-step

1. Read the paper carefully

  • Understand the research question, biological setting, data modality, and assumptions behind the investigation of an AI system’s limitations or failures.
  • Identify the negative or unexpected outcome and assess how well the paper investigates it.
  • Assess how clearly and thoroughly the paper characterizes this limitation or failure mode.

2. Assess the paper using these criteria

  • Clarity of the problem and claims. Is the biological task, modeling approach, and claimed failure mode clearly stated?
  • Technical rigour and reproducibility. Are methods and conclusions well-supported by evidence? Are results documented carefully enough to reproduce?
  • Depth of failure analysis. Does the paper go beyond reporting a bad number to characterize causes (model, data, experimental design, or deployment)?
  • Novelty and significance of the negative result. Does the paper offer new insight into where AI for biology fails or misleads?
  • Alignment with workshop topics. Does the paper present a reasonable argument aligned with failure modes of AI in biology? Submissions that primarily report improved state-of-the-art performance without meaningful analysis of limitations or failures should receive a lower score on workshop alignment.

3. Write a constructive review and submit it before the deadline

Your review should include:

  • A short summary of the paper’s contributions and key findings.
  • Strengths and weaknesses of the submission.
  • Your recommendation with justification according to the criteria above.
  • Optional feedback to help authors improve their work.
  • Award nomination, when applicable: whether the paper is a strong candidate for the Entropic Award or the Didactic Award.

Conflicts of interest

OpenReview profiles will identify recent co-authorship and institutional conflicts. When an organizer has a conflict, a conflict-free two-person group from the program committee will make the final decision.

Code of Ethics

(Adapted from the NeurIPS reviewer guidance.)
All NeurIPS participants, including workshop reviewers, are required to adhere to the NeurIPS Code of Ethics and the NeurIPS Code of Conduct. Reviewers should read both and apply them throughout paper assessment and discussion.

As part of the review process, reviewers are asked to raise potential violations of the NeurIPS Code of Ethics. Authors are encouraged to discuss ethics questions in their submission; such discussion is not counted against the page limit and should appear as a separate section when included.

Use of large language models (LLMs)

(Adapted from NeurIPS reviewing practice.)
The use of LLMs is allowed as a general-purpose writing assistance tool. Reviewers remain fully responsible for content written under their name, including LLM-generated text that could constitute plagiarism, scientific misconduct, or low quality (for example, fabrication of facts). Reviews that exhibit such issues may be flagged as low quality.

General reviewing standards

For additional guidance on reviewing standards, including how NeurIPS interprets quality, clarity, significance, and originality for negative-results contributions: see the NeurIPS 2026 Reviewer Guidelines.

Review timeline

The tentative review period is August 29 - September 21, 2026September 2, 2026 - September 21, 2026.

Program committee

Full public names and profile links will be announced after confirmation.

We appreciate your contributions to making this workshop valuable and insightful. Please reach out at icbinbbio@gmail.com with any questions. Thank you for supporting the review process.