Frequently Asked Questions

Presentation

• Are papers presented as posters or oral presentations?

  All papers will be presented as posters. A small number of papers will be selected for oral presentations. We will notify the authors of papers selected for oral presentations around mid September.
• I can’t make it, can I send you the poster to print and hang in the session? Or is there a way to present remotely?

  We are sorry, but COLM cannot place your poster for you in the poster session. This is not within the capacity of the conference. It is not good for the conference and dynamics onsite, and it does not result in a meaningful presentation of your work. Submission to COLM entails the responsibility of all the authors for presenting the paper at COLM, just like other conferences. Because COLM is an in-person conference only, this entails attendance and travel. If absolutely necessary, we recommend identifying a colleague who can travel or is already attending that is willing to present on your behalf (but COLM does not have the capacity to assist in this process).
• What are the poster dimensions?

  The poster size is 36in (H) x 72in (W).

Registration

• Full-time Student

  ^* Full Time Student

  • You must be a full-time student in an accredited undergraduate, Master’s or graduate program, or a continuing student (i.e., accepted into such a program for the next academic cycle). You will be required to upload a digital version of your student ID at registration.
  • Must have been a student when submitting the paper for review.
  • If attending the physical conference, you will need to present your physical student ID when you check in.
• Registration

  Registration Cancellation Policy

  To ease the process of registration and visa applications, we are providing several mechanisms to help:

  • Full refunds to conference admission until The date CancellationDeadline not found. and additional refund options due to Visa issues after that date. Refunds will be issued to your credit card and may take up to 10 business days to process.  To cancel a registration, please go to the Payment and Receipt section of your registration.
  • Automatic visa letter generation upon registration.
  • Prioritized Special Event code for Canadian Visas (included in the invitation letter).

  Registrations can be neither canceled nor refunded after The date CancellationDeadline not found., the cancellation deadline except in 

  Visa information for physical or hybrid conferences

  If your visa is denied before The date CancellationDeadline not found.,  you may use the standard cancellation policy detailed above to cancel and refund your registration in full.

  If you applied for your visa before July 30, 2026, and you are unable to attend because your visa was denied or you have not received a response we will refund your registration fees. 

  After Sept. 5, 2026, your full conference registration can be refunded if the following conditions are satisfied:

  • you applied for your visa by July 30, 2026 and
  • you are unable to attend the conference in person because your visa was denied or you have not received a response.

  To request such a refund, you must submit a request using our contact form within one week of the close of the meeting, and include documentation showing the date you applied for a visa.

   

  Registrations are not transferrable

  Registrations cannot be transferred to another person, they are linked to immigration documents, tax documents and credit card transactions.

  See our registration transfer policy.

   

Reviewing

• Reviewer Load

  We expect a reviewing load of up to 5 papers per reviewer.
• Reviewer Qualifications

  Reviewers must have research experience equivalent to a second-year graduate student in machine learning or a related field. They must have been a primary author* on at least two peer-reviewed conference or journal papers published in a related venue (e.g., ACL, NAACL, EMNLP, ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR, JMLR, TMLR, CVPR, ICCV – this is not an exhaustive list). We strongly encourage each first-time reviewer to identify a ‘mentor’ (such as a research advisor or manager) who has both the necessary qualifications for and prior experience with reviewing, and who has agreed to oversee and assist the reviewer in their reviewing tasks. The research experience ensures the reviewer is to be able to competently evaluate a submission's methodology, interpret findings and results, and to evaluate contributions in the context of prior works. Prior authorship ensures that the reviewer understands the peer review process (at least from the side of the authors) and the standards and conventions of composing reviews and corresponding with authors. This text is adapted from ICML. *We leave it to your own discretion to interpret what is meant by 'primary author', as this may vary between sub-areas of machine learning.
• What are the requirements to exempt a paper from reciprocal reviewing?

  To be exempt from reciprocal reviewing, a paper must have at least one author who is a member of the COLM program committee with no reduced quota (i.e., as a reviewer, AC, or PC) at the time of submission. Alternatively, the paper may be exempt if all authors are unqualified to review for COLM.
• What is the reciprocal reviewing requirement?

  There are two reciprocal reviewing requirements: a 'per-submission' requirement, and a 'per-reviewer' requirement. The submission form will allow submitters to designate an author to fulfill the per-submission requirement, or to indicate that the submission is exempt from the requirement. Multiple submissions cannot have the same reciprocal reviewer, unless all other authors do not qualify or are serving in other roles. Any author with 4 or more submissions will automatically be added to the reviewer pool, unless they are already part of the program committee or the COLM organization. Why are we doing this? COLM is fairly new, so we do not have reliable estimates of reviewing need. We are preparing a large and high quality program committee. In the event that our estimates are too low, we are also preparing to scale the committee with the number of submissions by requiring reciprocal reviewing.