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.

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.

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.

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.

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

All fields will remain editable until the full paper submission deadline. However, we recommend to keep edits to a minimum, and only to necessary edits, so as to minimize any distruptions to the work of the program committee.

Yes, COLM will allow authors of accepted papers to add an extra page to the camera ready to add content following the reviewers and AC feedback.

We are sorry, but COLM does not allow double submissions. All papers under the ARR process, regardless of stage, are considered as under submission to ARR, and cannot be submitted to COLM. COLM will conduct double submission checks following the full paper submission deadline. Only papers then under review will be checked. This means that papers withdrawn before, including abstracts with no full paper submitted, will not be considered or used for double submission checks. COLM cannot provide guarantees of compatiblity with regard to the policies and processes of other venues regarding double submissions, but this policy what we consider as under submission at COLM.

See the dates page

COLM will use the following policy, adapted from NeurIPS: 'Non-anonymous preprints (on arXiv, social media, websites, etc.) are permitted. We recommend you indicate “preprint”, rather than the “final” option int he template. Reviewers will be instructed not to actively look for such preprints, but encountering them will not constitute a conflict of interest. Authors may submit work to COLM that is already available as a preprint (e.g., on arXiv) without citing it; however, previously published papers by the authors on related topics must be cited (with adequate anonymization to preserve double-blind reviewing; see below).

COLM 2025 will not have a separate track for short papers. We appreciate the value of short papers, but for time being we are not supporting this submission track.

COLM does not have a separate track, reviewing, or call for position papers for the 2025 call. We are opting for simplicity, so will not solicit for position papers, because to be treated properly, they require a different reviewing process.

We don't have a special track for survey papers. If you wish, you can submit a survey paper and we will route it to the appropriate area chairs and reviewers and based on their judgment, you will get a decision.

We are actively looking for sponsors for the event. Please contact srush.research@gmail.com if you are interested.

Yes, COLM is an archival venue. You may submit to non-archival venues in addition to COLM, but not to archival venues.

The conference will be single-track with invited speakers, oral presentations, and poster sessions. COLM 2025 will also include one day for workshops.

COLM is an in-person conference only, and is unable to provide a virtual attance option.

We are working on the process, and will provide more information to submitting authors after the submission deadline. If you are not a submitting author, please contact COLM a few week after the submission deadline.

We are making significant efforts that all authors can attend COLM, including by providing early registration options to start the visa process in advance and through the creation of travel grants. If no author can attend, we will allow the paper to be presented at COLM by a colleague. We believe this is not ideal, so ask to only use this option if all other options are exhausted. COLM is an in-person conference only, and all papers must be presented in person. If all the above options were truly exhausted, authors can contact the PCs to work out a solution. Before contacting the PCs, please make sure to have exhausted all other options in a timely and demonstrable manner. We will not be able to help if the authors have not demonstrated good-faith efforts to attend COLM.

It is pronounced like 'Collum' based on the Irish name Colm (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colm). It means dove 🕊️.