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Do Reviewers Still Reward Lexical Complexity? A Frozen-Rater Study of Preference Drift in 124K ICLR Reviews

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Sep 8, 2026 · UTC

Large language models have collapsed the cost of producing lexically elaborate prose, and whether peer reviewers still reward it is a question about the evaluator, not about the text. When the association between a writing cue and review scores moves across years, the reviewers may have changed, the submissions may have changed, or both, and a regression of scores on text cannot say which. We separate the two with a frozen rater: 81,850 machine reviews of ICLR submissions from 2018 to 2025, all generated in one February-April 2025 window with one model family and one prompt, so that its year-t

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