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Senior Area Chair (SAC) Guidelines

This page provides guidelines for Senior Area Chairs (SACs) for AISTATS 2027. It references the SAC guidelines of NeurIPS 2025.

As an SAC, your role is to oversee the work of some number of ACs, making sure that the reviewing process goes smoothly. SACs serve as the first point of contact for ACs if they need assistance or guidance. SACs are responsible for helping ACs chase late reviewers, calibrating decisions across ACs, and discussing borderline papers with ACs. During the final decision-making phase, SACs discuss all proposed decisions with the program chairs (PCs). SACs may also contribute suggestions regarding potential speakers.

Contact Info

If you encounter a situation that you are unable to resolve on your own, please contact the program chairs at aistats2027+pc@gmail.com. Any questions about ethics or conflicts of interest should go to the PCs.

If the issue is related to OpenReview, email the OpenReview support team directly at info@openreview.net.

Important Dates

Dates may be subject to change. All dates are Anywhere on Earth (AoE; UTC-12), end of day, unless specified otherwise.

  • Abstract submission deadline: September 29, 2026
  • Bidding phase: September 29, 2026 - October 6, 2026
  • Full paper submission deadline (including all supplementary material): October 6, 2026  (There is no separate supplementary material deadline this year.)
  • Paper-reviewer initial assignments: October 12, 2026
  • Review period: October 15, 2026 - November 5, 2026
  • Checking and soliciting emergency reviews: November 6, 2026 - November 13, 2026
  • Initial AC meta-review period: November 8, 2026 - November 13, 2026
  • Reviews and AI review released to authors; author rebuttal period: November 16, 2026 - November 22, 2026
  • Author-reviewer discussion period: November 23, 2026 - December 3, 2026
  • Reviewer-AC discussion period: December 4, 2026 - December 14, 2026
  • Final AC meta-review deadline: December 15, 2026
  • AC-SAC discussion period: December 16, 2026 - December 22, 2026
  • SAC initial decisions: January 5, 2027
  • SAC-PC discussion period: January 6, 2027 - January 19, 2027
  • Paper final decision notifications: TBC
  • Journal-to-conference track submission due: to be announced
  • Conference dates: May 3, 2027 - May 6, 2027

Main Tasks

  1. Preparation & AC assignment
    • Please ensure that your preferred email address is accurate in your OpenReview profile. We will send most emails from OpenReview (i.e., noreply@openreview.net). Such emails are sometimes accidentally marked as spam. Please check your spam folder regularly. If you find such an email in there, please whitelist the OpenReview email address so that you will receive future emails from OpenReview.
    • Please log into OpenReview and make sure that your profile is up to date, so that you will be assigned relevant ACs to work with.
    • Read and agree to abide by the AISTATS code of conduct.
    • In addition to the guidelines below, please familiarize yourself with the AC guidelines. You will be interacting significantly with ACs, so please make sure you understand what is expected of them. You can also view the Reviewer guidelines.
    • You will be assigned at most 10 ACs to work with. When you receive your assignment, look it over carefully and email the PCs if you have any concerns.
  2. Ensure that all papers have at least 3 quality reviews
    • Reviews are due November 5, 2026. ACs should ensure that the reviewers have completed their reviews, send reminder emails if needed, and read all reviews to ensure they are up to standards. Again, your workload should be light during this period, but do check in to make sure that ACs are following up on missing reviews.
    • Before the author response period starts, ensure that all of the papers your ACs are assigned have at least 3 high quality reviews. Make sure that ACs check for any disrespectful or derogatory language in the reviews. You are ultimately responsible for making sure the reviews are all there and high quality, so if an AC is unresponsive you will need to step in.
    • When necessary, make sure that ACs recruit emergency reviewers to ensure that all papers receive 3 reviews. Along with ACs, flag inappropriate reviews (including suspected LLM-generated reviews, which count as missing reviews).
  3. Ensure ACs provide initial meta-reviews before the rebuttal
    • New in 2027: ACs must submit an initial meta-review for each of their papers during the initial AC meta-review period (November 8 - 13, 2026), i.e., before the reviews are released to the authors and the rebuttal begins. These initial meta-reviews summarize the state of the reviews and identify the key points the authors should address in their response; they are preliminary and will be revised after the rebuttal and discussions.
    • Make sure that all ACs you supervise submit their initial meta-reviews by November 13, 2026. If an AC is unresponsive, step in and contact the PCs.
  4. Ensure ACs initiate reviewer-author discussions
    • As soon as the author response is entered in the system, ACs should lead a discussion via OpenReview for each submission and make sure the reviewers engage in the discussion phase. If your assigned ACs have not initiated discussions, prompt them to do so. This phase 1 of the discussions (November 23 - December 3, 2026) will be primarily for the reviewers to engage with the authors before the closed discussions among the reviewers and ACs.
  5. Oversee the AC-reviewer discussions
    • During these dates, the reviewers should interact with the AC and among themselves. Please make sure there is active engagement, especially for the papers where there are positive and negative reviews.
    • New in 2027: every submission receives an AI-generated review targeting factual correctness (see "AI Review of Submissions" below). During the discussion phase, the AI review and the authors' response to it are available to reviewers and ACs as one input among others. Make sure ACs treat it accordingly: it does not produce a score or a recommendation, and all decisions remain human.
  6. AC final meta-reviews
    • After the rebuttal and discussion phases, ACs must revise their initial meta-reviews to account for the author responses, the discussions, and the AI review. Remind ACs to submit their final meta-reviews for each paper by December 15, 2026 and begin to schedule one-on-one discussions with them for the next phase. Consider organizing meetings between pairs or groups of ACs so that they have the chance to talk over their decisions and better calibrate. Check carefully for COIs before discussing papers with multiple ACs.
  7. SACs discuss papers with ACs and make initial accept/reject decisions
    • Help calibrate decisions by working closely with your ACs. Schedule meetings with them individually and/or in groups. Pay particularly close attention to borderline papers and papers in which the AC's recommendation goes against the recommendations of the reviewers.
    • If you feel that a particular AC needs your guidance, please read all reviews for papers assigned to them. Make sure they are respectful and acknowledge the authors' response.
    • Read all meta-reviews. Make sure they explain paper decisions to the authors. Meta-reviews should augment the reviews, and explain how the reviews, author responses, and discussion were used to arrive at the decision. Dismissing or ignoring a review is not acceptable unless there is a good reason for doing so.
  8. Communicate with program chairs to finalize decisions
    • Be prepared to discuss all borderline papers and cases in which the recommendation of the AC goes against the recommendations of the reviewers.
    • Update meta-reviews to accurately reflect the final decision.

Best Practices

  • Be responsive. Respect deadlines and respond to emails as promptly as possible. Make sure that your preferred email address is accurate in your OpenReview profile and that emails from noreply@openreview.net don’t go to spam. If you will be unavailable (e.g., on vacation) for more than a few days—especially during important windows (e.g., decision-making)—please let the program chairs know as soon as possible.
  • Be proactive. It is your responsibility to ensure that the review process goes smoothly. Check in to make sure that the ACs you work with are responsive, help them find emergency reviewers, and make sure discussion is happening on their papers.
  • Be kind. It is important to acknowledge that personal situations may lead to late or unfinished work among reviewers and ACs. In the event that a reviewer or an AC is unable to complete their work on time, we encourage you to be considerate of the personal circumstances; you might have to pick up the slack in some cases. If necessary, make a back-up plan with another reviewer or AC, and be flexible to the extent possible. In all communications, exhibit empathy and understanding.
  • Respect conflicts of interest. Since the reviewing process is double blind at the level of ACs, it is your responsibility to be on the lookout for uncaught conflicts of interest. If you notice a conflict of interest with a submission that is assigned to one of your ACs, contact program chairs right away. Do not talk to other SACs about submissions assigned to your ACs without prior approval from program chairs since other SACs may have conflicts with these submissions. Do not talk to other SACs or ACs about submissions you are an author on or submissions with which you have a conflict of interest.
  • Familiarize yourself with the code of conduct. All participants must agree to abide by the AISTATS code of conduct.

Use of Generative AI

Large language models (LLMs) cannot be used to write reviews or meta-reviews. Reviewers, ACs, and SACs must not delegate their judgement and critique of a submission to an LLM, must not produce their reviews or meta-reviews with an LLM, and must not enter submission content into non-privacy-compliant tools. Violations may lead to sanctions, including the desk rejection of the violator's own submissions. Refer to the Ethical Conduct for Peer Review section in the Reviewer Guidelines for the policy statement.

Authors may use LLMs and other generative AI tools for research and writing, but every submission must include a mandatory AI Use Statement, and authors bear full responsibility for all content. LLMs cannot be authors. Submissions whose writing is unclear, unfocused, or padded — as is typical of insufficiently edited AI-generated text — are candidates for rejection or desk rejection. Refer to the Use of Generative AI by Authors section in the Call for Papers for the policy statement.

AI Review of Submissions

New in 2027: all submissions go through an AI review, generated by an LLM-based system operated by the conference. It targets factual correctness only (incorrect or unsupported claims, errors or gaps in proofs, inconsistencies between text, tables, and figures, mismatches between the described and reported experimental setup, and misattributed related work). It does not assess significance or novelty, does not produce a score, and makes no recommendation. Human reviewers do not see it while writing their reviews; it is released to authors at the start of the rebuttal period, and made available to reviewers and ACs during the discussion phase. The AI review is one input among others; all decisions are made by the ACs, SACs, and PCs based on the human reviews and discussion. Refer to the AI Review of Submissions section in the Call for Papers for details.

Confidentiality

You must keep everything relating to the review process confidential. Do not use ideas, code, or results from submissions in your own work until they become publicly available (e.g., via a technical report or a published paper for ideas/results, via open source for code). Do not talk about or distribute submissions (whether it is the code, or the ideas and results described in them) to anyone without prior approval from the program chairs. Code submitted for reviewing cannot be distributed. If you wish to invite an external reviewer, do so through OpenReview rather than sharing submissions through another channel.