Rebuttal Response Skills

Goal

Produce reviewer-specific responses that are direct, easy to verify, and strictly grounded in the submitted paper or approved rebuttal evidence. Keep internal risk control rigorous without turning the visible response into a stream of disclaimers.

Choose the Workflow

Use the full workflow for a complete rebuttal, multiple reviewers, new evidence or experiments, a meta-review, or a final acceptance audit. Maintain four internal artifact classes in the task's rebuttal directory:

1. Exact review archive, such as reviews.md.
2. Concern/evidence map with a shared decision ledger, such as concern_map.md.
3. One response per reviewer.
4. Final audit record, such as rebuttal_audit.md.

Use the lightweight workflow for a bounded sentence rewrite, one isolated question, or minor formatting. Edit inline and create no files unless the user asks. Preserve the original technical meaning and claim strength by default. The supplied sentence is sufficient for a pure prose edit; ask for context only when clarity would require changing a factual claim, number, quotation, or scope statement.

Read references/response-patterns.md when drafting a full response, integrating experiments, resolving a risk marker, running a blind audit, or performing final format verification.

Establish Sources of Truth

1. Treat the complete review text supplied by the user as the review source of truth. If the user later supplies a revised version, use it and record the replacement. Check the platform only when text is incomplete, versions conflict, or the user asks. Do not draft a full response from a review summary; request the exact weaknesses, questions, score, and confidence.
2. Read the submitted paper and supplement as the reviewer saw them. Prefer the submitted PDF for claims and values; use source files to locate content only when their submitted status is verified.
3. For rebuttal-only work, treat the submission as immutable evidence. Record its hash or version before work and verify it is unchanged at the end. Edit it only under a separate explicit request.
4. Determine the official response mode, per-response or shared limit, anonymity rules, Markdown/LaTeX support, and link or attachment policy. Verify current official instructions when the venue is known and the user has not supplied them.

Map Every Concern

Read each review sentence by sentence before drafting. For every substantive point, record:

• exact original sentence and source section;
• premise and actual concern;
• explicit request or score-shifting condition;
• submitted and rebuttal evidence, with exact source locations;
• evidence gap and proposed response mode;
• one coverage status: fully answered, partially answered, untested boundary, or pending evidence.

Keep a separate map per reviewer and a shared decision ledger for user-confirmed values, prohibited wording, excluded experiments, cross-reviewer terminology, and stop decisions.

• Preserve the review's visible order unless the user explicitly requests a different order. A meta-review may change emphasis, not sequence.
• Match labels to the source. Use W1, Q1, and similar labels rather than generic C1 labels.
• Prefer the reviewer's complete decisive sentence or sentences as the heading. Shorten only for precision or a binding format limit.
• Never place a paraphrase or stitched fragment inside quotation marks.
• Merge true duplicates internally. Preserve separate headings when overlapping questions contain distinct requests.
• Every substantive point must be answered, explicitly combined with a duplicate, marked as an untested boundary, or held for one necessary user decision.

Build the Response

Start each reviewer response with at most two short sentences that state the answer order. Restore method context only when the answer would otherwise be hard to understand; do not mechanically re-explain the paper.

For every issue:

1. Give the direct answer in the first sentence.
2. Explain only the mechanism, definition, or setup needed for that issue.
3. Present evidence before interpretation.
4. State the narrow implication supported by that evidence.
5. Add a concrete camera-ready clarification only when the submitted wording actually needs correction.

Writing rules:

• Prefer short declarative sentences and terminology already used in the submission. Introduce a new term only when necessary and define it once.
• Use the order direct answer, evidence, and supported impact. Avoid opening or closing with an apology, “we acknowledge,” or a pre-emptive concession when the evidence is already clear.
• When a table fully reports a secondary metric or tradeoff, point to the measured value and explain its impact only if it changes the reviewer's question, the comparison's fairness, or the claim's applicability. Do not manufacture a negative rhetorical ending from a table-visible value.
• If the review relies on an incorrect or incomplete premise, correct it politely with submitted evidence, then answer the underlying concern.
• Stay within that reviewer's explicit concerns. Shared evidence may be reused, but do not import another reviewer's limitations, baselines, or side issues.
• Acknowledge an especially useful or decision-critical question once when it improves the exchange. Avoid routine praise and repeated gratitude.
• Use a closing contribution synthesis only for a low-score review or when it is needed to change the overall assessment.
• Never promise an experiment, release, revision, capability, or positive future result merely to make the response sound complete.

These are style constraints, not a way to evade a review. A reviewer-requested negative result, evidence gap, or boundary remains part of the answer; state it plainly and narrow the claim when necessary.

Present Experiments and Numbers

• State a shared dataset, model pair, and setup once near the beginning. Mark local exceptions beside the relevant table.
• Use a normal Markdown table when the reviewer must compare several conditions or metrics. Use prose for only one or two values.
• Define every rebuttal-specific condition, schedule, statistic, and nonstandard metric at first use. For a derived metric, give its calculation, unit, and whether higher or lower is better. Do not re-define standard paper metrics unnecessarily.
• Keep shared values and definitions identical across reviewers. Crop a shared table to reviewer-relevant rows or columns when useful.
• Do not present pending runs, placeholders, expected trends, or partial outputs as results.

Enforce Evidence Discipline

• Use submitted PDF/LaTeX values for submitted claims. Use matched controls from the same protocol for a new rebuttal experiment.
• If a reproduction materially conflicts with the submission, stop and ask the user. Pause the affected claim, table, and every dependent response; continue only work that does not depend on the conflict. Do not silently choose, average, or substitute values. Treat a conflict as material when it could change a reviewer-facing conclusion, comparison ordering, or claim boundary.
• Before proposing a new experiment, inspect the main paper, appendix, and supplement. When reusing submitted evidence, cite its exact location and summarize the observation relevant to the concern; do not write only "see Appendix."
• A logically matched proxy is acceptable. Define what it measures once and do not describe it as direct evidence for an unmeasured quantity.
• Separate measured results, analytical derivations, architectural reasoning, dataset facts, and future directions.
• Use $research-evidence when an answer depends on external literature, dataset facts, novelty positioning, or citation authenticity. Never invent a citation.

For capability or deployment questions, distinguish:

1. what the method design permits;
2. what the submitted implementation supports;
3. what the experiments evaluate.

Use the paper description first. Inspect code or configuration when the paper cannot answer an explicitly implementation-specific question or the user asks. Do not turn an architectural extension into an implemented or evaluated claim.

Control New Evidence and Risks

Before starting any new experiment, give the user the minimal design, the review concern it answers, the comparison and controls, and the outcome criteria. Run it only after explicit approval.

Retain every predeclared condition in the internal evidence record. Do not silently remove a mixed or negative condition. Mark high-impact uncertainty as:

[REVIEW NEEDED | Ideal: ... | Observed: ... | Decision: ...]

Use this marker for material numeric conflicts, mixed or negative results, proxy limitations, or a proposed claim/commitment needing approval. Explain each marker to the user one at a time and remove it only after explicit confirmation. A submission candidate must contain no marker, placeholder, or pending result. The user decides the reviewer-facing presentation, but a reviewer-requested result, a promised condition, or evidence material to a visible claim cannot be omitted merely because it is negative. Report it or narrow the claim so the response remains complete and non-misleading.

If the user says to stop an experiment or stop discussing a protocol dispute, stop immediately. Do not continue the run, internal investigation, or questioning. Do not add the stopped technical sub-issue to the visible response unless the user later requests it. This does not authorize silently dropping an explicit reviewer concern: answer that concern with approved existing evidence or one concise untested-boundary statement. If the user explicitly directs its omission, record that decision in the ledger.

For an untested or infeasible request, answer what current evidence or reasoning supports, state the untested part once, and propose a future direction only after user approval. Do not guarantee implementation or a favorable outcome.

Handle Meta-Review

When a meta-review exists, extract its decision-critical or score-shifting conditions and map each one to the relevant reviewer response and final AC audit. Add a condition to a reviewer response only when it directly overlaps that reviewer's concern. If a meta-only condition has no response entry and no such overlap, keep it as an internal AC item rather than forcing it into an unrelated response. Do not change the default reviewer order. Draft a standalone meta response only when the platform provides an appropriate entry.

Run a Blind Reviewer and AC Audit

For a high-stakes final response, use fresh subagents when available. If fresh agents are unavailable, run separate paper-only and response-aware self-audit passes using the same input isolation, and state internally that independence was not achieved.

1. Paper-only phase: Give each reviewer agent only the submitted paper, supplement, venue scoring scale, and public rules. Ask for an independent review, score, confidence, and major concerns. Lock this output.
2. Response phase: Then give the same agent the corresponding exact official review and response. Ask which concerns are answered, whether the score changes, and whether a response defect remains.
3. AC phase: After reviewer audits, give a fresh AC agent the submitted materials, meta-review when present, official reviews, responses, and audit outcomes.

Never expose the concern map, decision ledger, author strategy, target score, suspected weakness, or intended conclusion to blind agents.

Classify audit findings as:

• Response defect: missed concern, evasion, unsupported claim, contradiction, misleading evidence, or format violation.
• Unresolved paper limitation: a real limitation the response cannot remove.
• Optional strengthening: a non-blocking improvement.

Only a Response defect blocks by default. Each reviewer agent must report its before/after score, per-concern coverage, and final ACCEPTABLE or blocking defect. The final candidate passes only when every reviewer audit and the AC audit reports ACCEPTABLE with no blocking response defect. Do not expand the rebuttal for unrelated new concerns unless they expose a fatal factual error, integrity risk, or direct contradiction.

Final Verification

Use a fresh format-verifier agent plus deterministic checks. If no fresh agent is available, run a separate verifier pass using only the final candidate and official rules. Follow the platform's official counting method; require the candidate to remain below a character limit and within a page limit.

1. Coverage: all mapped concerns retain correct order and labels; no reviewer-specific issue has leaked into another response.
2. Evidence: every number and factual claim has provenance; comparisons are fair; no unapproved commitment or unresolved high-impact decision remains.
3. Rendering: enforce the official character or page limit; check Markdown tables, LaTeX delimiters, headings, anonymity, machine paths, allowed links, and PDF compile/render quality when applicable.
4. Cleanliness: search for REVIEW NEEDED, TODO, pending, placeholders, and internal artifact paths. Resolve every hit before submission.
5. Immutability: verify the submitted paper and supplement version or hash is unchanged.

For a follow-up reviewer comment, answer only the new delta unless it changes the overall strategy.