Summary:

Briefly summarize the paper and its contributions in your own language.

• Summarize the paper motivation, key contributions and achievements in a paragraph.
• There are many examples of contributions that warrant publication.  These contributions may be theoretical, methodological, algorithmic, empirical, connecting ideas in disparate fields (“bridge papers”), or providing a critical analysis (e.g., principled justifications of why the community is going after the wrong outcome or using the wrong types of approaches.).

Strengths:

Describe the strengths of the work. Typical criteria include: soundness of the claims (theoretical grounding, empirical evaluation), significance and novelty of the contribution, and relevance to the NeurIPS community.

• It could be about the soundness of the theoretical claim or the soundness of empirical methodology used to validate an empirical approach.
• Another important axis is the significance and the novelty of the contributions relative to what has been done already in the literature, and here you would want to cite these relevant prior works.
• One measure of the significance of a contribution is (your belief about) the level to which researchers or practitioners will make use of or be influenced by the proposed ideas. Solid, technical papers that explore new territory or point out new directions for research are preferable to papers that advance the state of the art, but only incrementally.
• Finally, a possible strength is the relevance of the line of work for the community.

Weaknesses:

Explain the limitations of this work along the same axes as above.

• Your comments should be detailed, specific, and polite. Please avoid vague, subjective complaints.
• Always be constructive and help the authors understand your viewpoint, without being dismissive or using inappropriate language. Remember that you are not reviewing your level of interest in the submission, but its scientific contribution to the field.
• Do not reject papers solely because they are missing citations or comparisons to prior work that has only been published without review (e.g., arXiv or technical reports).

Correctness: Are the claims and method correct? Is the empirical methodology correct?

Explain if there is anything incorrect with the paper. Incorrect claims or methodology are the primary reason for rejection. Be as detailed, specific and polite as possible. Thoroughly motivate your criticism so that authors will understand your point of view and potentially respond to you.

Clarity: Is the paper well written?

Rate the clarity of exposition of the paper. Give examples of what parts of the paper need revision to improve clarity.

Relation to prior work: Is it clearly discussed how this work differs from previous contributions?