Conflicts of Interest
This document defines what constitutes a conflict of interest for the MLSys 2025 review process. You will be asked to separately enter two types of conflicts into CMT, domain conflicts and individual conflicts.
Domain conflicts:
A domain conflict should be used for your current or recent employment or graduate institution, where “recent” means “within the last three years.” For current or recent collaborations, including internships, you should generally use individual conflicts (see next section). Please use domain conflicts judiciously, reserving them for cases when you have a genuine conflict of interest with the institution.
As an author, you will be asked to enter domain conflicts both for yourself and for each of your submissions. While this may seem redundant, not all authors will log in to CMT and we still need their conflicts. When you enter a domain conflict for yourself, none of your submissions will be visible to reviewers who have also entered this domain. When you enter a domain conflict for a submission, that submission will not be visible to reviewers who have also entered this domain. (Please note that domain conflicts entered for one submission do NOT propagate to the authors’ other submissions.) When you enter a domain conflict as a reviewer you will not be able to see submissions from authors who have also entered this domain.
Please note that CMT does not automatically add the domain from your email address, so you have to add it manually. If an institution has multiple domains (e.g., fb.com and facebook.com), please enter all of them. Please do NOT enter the domain of email providers (i.e., gmail.com, hotmail.com, etc.).
Conflict domains should be separated by semicolons (e.g., cam.ac.uk; microsoft.com).
Conflicts with individual authors and reviewers:
The following constitutes an individual conflict:
- Family relationship or close personal relationship
- Graduate advisee/advisor relationship
- Any current, recent, or recurring collaboration (including grants and internships)
Note: “recent” means “within the last three years.”
Similarly to domain conflicts, you can specify individual conflicts both for yourself and for each of your submissions. Unlike domain conflicts, no overlap rule is applied to individual conflicts (if you share an individual conflict with someone, you are not automatically conflicted unless you also have a direct individual conflict).
Individual conflicts must be entered into CMT either during the submission process (for authors and submissions) or prior to the submission process (for reviewers).
It is the responsibility of a contact author to ensure that all domain and individual conflicts for the submission are declared, either by their co-authors or for the submission.
Please note that all declared conflicts will only be used for MLSys 2025.
Other conflicts:
In very rare cases, an author may have an individual conflict that is not covered by the definition above, but would nonetheless significantly compromise the fairness of the review process. If, after careful consideration, you feel that you need to enter such a conflict for one of your submissions, please email the program chairs before the submission deadline. The program chairs reserve the right to ignore this information when assigning submissions to reviewers.