[D] The bar for technical novelty at ICLR and simultaneous submissions

I just came across two papers submitted to ICLR this year by the same group:

* [https://openreview.net/pdf?id=IP28nY6TJQ](https://openreview.net/pdf?id=IP28nY6TJQ)
* [https://openreview.net/pdf?id=lJYAkDVnRU](https://openreview.net/pdf?id=lJYAkDVnRU)

Although the two papers are in different domains, their proposed methods are almost identical if you swap out the encoders (see Figure 1 in both papers).

idk, these papers technically don't break any ICLR rules (that I know of), but they seem to violate the spirit of the conference.

What do you all think? The chance of the second paper being …

domains figure iclr machinelearning technical