rebuttal

name: rebuttal description: Analyze reviewer feedback and prepare grounded, venue-compliant rebuttals or author responses for conference submissions. Use when asked to check reviews, plan a rebuttal strategy, reply to reviewers, draft an OpenReview/CMT response, handle ICML/NeurIPS/ICLR/CoRL reviewer comments, compress replies to a hard character limit, or manage post-submission follow-up discussion threads.

Handle post-submission reviewer responses conservatively. Optimize for strict limits, full coverage, and zero fabrication.

Required Inputs

Collect these before drafting:

paper source: LaTeX, PDF, or a reliable summary from the user
raw reviews: verbatim text with reviewer IDs when available
venue rules: venue name, hard character or word limit, formatting constraints, and whether revised PDFs are allowed
stage: initial rebuttal, author discussion, or follow-up round
approved evidence: new experiments, derivations, analyses, or commitments that the user explicitly confirms may be mentioned

If venue rules or the limit are missing, stop and ask.

Hard Gates

Do not finalize a rebuttal unless all three pass.

Provenance gate Every factual claim must map to one of: the submitted paper, the raw review, user-confirmed result, user-confirmed derivation, or clearly labeled future work.
Commitment gate Do not promise experiments, revisions, or analyses unless the user explicitly approved them.
Coverage gate Every reviewer concern must end as answered, intentionally deferred, or blocked on user input. No issue disappears.

Workflow

1. Normalize the inputs

Create a rebuttal/ workspace when useful. Preserve raw reviews verbatim in rebuttal/REVIEWS_RAW.md.

Record:

venue and limit
current round
paper source used
any approved new evidence
unresolved ambiguities

2. Atomize reviewer concerns

Create rebuttal/ISSUE_BOARD.md.

For each atomic issue, track:

issue_id
reviewer
short raw quote or anchor
issue type: novelty, empirical support, baseline, theory, assumptions, clarity, reproducibility, significance, or other
severity: critical, major, or minor
response mode: clarification, grounded evidence, narrow concession, future-work boundary, or needs user input
evidence source
status

Merge duplicates across reviewers, but keep reviewer-local phrasing visible.

3. Build a response strategy

Create rebuttal/STRATEGY_PLAN.md.

Identify:

shared themes across reviewers
per-reviewer priorities
blocked claims or unsupported counters
evidence gaps that need user confirmation
a rough space budget for opener, per-reviewer answers, and closing

Recommend what to emphasize for the likely swing reviewers, not just the loudest criticism.

4. Handle evidence gaps conservatively

If an issue needs new experiments, derivations, or literature checks:

do not invent results
do not imply the work is already done if it is not
present the gap clearly to the user
only run or describe extra work if the user explicitly asks for it or confirms it already exists

When literature support matters, verify references with zotero_web, zotero, arxiv_search, or other reliable sources before mentioning them.

5. Draft the rebuttal

Draft in the venue's expected format. For text-only rebuttals, default to:

short opener thanking reviewers and summarizing the main resolutions
per-reviewer responses with direct answers first
short closing that states what was resolved and why the paper merits acceptance

Default paragraph pattern:

direct answer
grounded evidence from the paper or approved new evidence
implication for the reviewer concern

Prefer concrete numbers, ablations, and precise clarifications over rhetoric.

Concede narrowly when the reviewer is right. Do not spend much space on unwinnable arguments.

Answer supportive reviewers too. Reinforce the positive framing they already noticed.

6. Produce two versions when helpful

When the venue has a tight limit, prepare:

rebuttal/PASTE_READY.txt: plain text, within the hard limit, ready to submit
rebuttal/REBUTTAL_DRAFT.md: a richer version with optional material marked for trimming

If the user only wants analysis, stop after the issue board and strategy plan.

7. Validate before finalizing

Check all of the following:

every issue is covered
every factual statement is grounded
every commitment is approved
tone is respectful, confident, and non-defensive
replies do not contradict each other
the final version fits the exact venue limit

If over the limit, compress in this order:

remove redundancy
shorten politeness
tighten opener and closing
tighten wording within answers
never drop a critical answer silently

8. Follow-up rounds

For new reviewer comments:

append them verbatim to rebuttal/FOLLOWUP_LOG.md
link them to existing issues or add new ones
draft a delta reply, not a full rewrite, unless the user asks for one
re-run the same safety checks

Style Rules

Be direct, calm, and specific.
Evidence beats assertion.
Do not sound combative, evasive, or submissive.
Do not fabricate citations, numbers, experiments, derivations, or reviewer intent.
Distinguish clearly between what the paper already shows, what the authors can clarify in the rebuttal, and what belongs to future work.
Respect the venue limit as a hard constraint.

Integration with Other Skills

Use paper-writing when the user also wants to revise the paper text, notation, tables, or figures.
Use literature-review when a reviewer requests a broader related-work analysis.
Use autoresearch-create only when the user explicitly wants supplementary experiments run in a loop.