Hi,

I need some advice on submission of classical ML papers in top conferences.

During my PhD I made some findings in classical ML (related to SVM and LR) which, on further deep diving, looks like original work (I checked with chatGPT and Gemini too).

When I tried to submit them to top conferences, while the reviewers have been reasonable in their reviews (acknowledging the innovation while asking me to run some more experiments and ablation studies), the AC shot down my paper, saying “this is a done and dusted topic”. Only at ACL did the AC ask me to resubmit incorporating the comments.

So is classical ML dead at top conferences? Are only deep learning and LLM works being accepted at top conferences? And should I stop trying to submit at top conferences and maybe try journals or simply Arxiv my work?