ICASSP Review Process

Use this to reason about review-stage strategy. Reopen the current call, paper kit, and IEEE SPS editorial and reviewer guidelines before making process claims, because the mechanics shift by cycle and are governed by the Signal Processing Society, not by a standing program.

Process model

• ICASSP review is organized by the IEEE Signal Processing Society through its technical committees; papers are routed by the EDICS subject category you select at submission.
• Review is single-blind: reviewers see author identities; authors do not see reviewers.
• Reviewers assess technical correctness, novelty and significance to the signal-processing community, experimental soundness with task-appropriate metrics, clarity in four pages, and reproducibility.
• A short rebuttal/author-response stage exists in recent cycles (a recent change from ICASSP's older no-rebuttal tradition); confirm it runs this year.
• Accepted papers are published in IEEE Xplore and presented in person, as oral or poster; both are full proceedings papers, and poster is not a second-class outcome.

Who reviews here

• The pool is signal-processing practitioners and academics clustered by technical committee, so a paper is judged by people fluent in its exact task's baselines and metrics.
• Reviewers expect the field-standard metric and a current strong baseline; a novel metric or a stale baseline is caught quickly because the reviewers work in that subfield.
• Because the paper is four pages, reviewers reward a claim they can verify quickly and penalize one that hides its operating point or its comparison.

Scoring leverage table

Review dimension	What raises it	What sinks it
Correctness	A clearly specified mechanism with the right signal model	Hand-waved DSP steps; undefined front-end
Significance	A result the subfield lacked, stated in its own terms	A generic-ML result with no signal insight
Evidence	Task-matched metric, strong baseline, condition sweep	Accuracy where SI-SDR belongs; one-SNR result
Clarity	One claim, redrawable architecture, legible figures	Four pages overloaded past legibility
Reproducibility	Scoring ruler and split shipped or precisely cited	Metric with no ruler, no split, no seeds

Stage-by-stage realism

• Assignment: your EDICS choice decides your reviewer pool; a mis-routed paper meets reviewers who do not value its contribution (see icassp-topic-selection).
• Reviews: read them for what the committee will weigh, not for tone; a terse review from an expert can carry more decision weight than a long one from a mismatched reviewer.
• Rebuttal (if it runs): short and text-only; move the one decision-critical objection, do not relitigate everything (see icassp-author-response).
• Decision: ICASSP acceptance rates have historically sat near half — competitive but not NeurIPS-scarce; a clean, correct, well-measured four pages is a strong candidate.

Decoding a decision letter

• "Interesting but incremental" usually means the delta versus a named baseline was not made explicit enough — a positioning fix, not necessarily a new experiment.
• "Insufficient evaluation" usually means a missing condition sweep or a non-standard metric, not a demand for a bigger model.
• A borderline reject on a correct paper often traces to a routing or metric-fit miss that the next cycle can repair.

Output format

[Current stage] submitted / reviews / rebuttal / decision / camera-ready
[Routing] EDICS category and whether it matched the claim
[Decision actors] technical committee / area organizers
[Likely leverage] correctness / significance / evidence / clarity / reproducibility
[Rebuttal move] <one decision-critical point, if a window exists>
[Next action] <one step>

Currency note

Single-blind review, EDICS routing, the recent rebuttal, and the roughly-even acceptance rate were checked 2026-07-09 against ICASSP 2026 renderings and SPS guidelines (see ../../resources/official-source-map.md). Any of these can change by cycle — re-verify before relying on them.