Confirm the target track: Main Track, AI for Social Impact, AI Alignment, or another AAAI program. Track-specific rules can differ.
Verify OpenReview account/profile readiness, conflicts, author list, subject areas, and submission metadata before the abstract and paper deadlines.
Check the current AAAI author kit. AAAI-27 submissions use AAAI two-column camera-ready style and US Letter PDF, with a main PDF of at most 9 pages whose pages 8-9 are references only — 7 pages of non-reference content. Any ethical statement counts inside those 7 pages.
Confirm double-blind compliance in the PDF, file names, references to prior work, supplement, code/data, and metadata. Omit acknowledgments in the review version.
Upload the reproducibility checklist in its own submission field, not inside the paper PDF — AAAI-27 moved it out of the document, and a checklist buried after the references is now a missing checklist.
Enforce the author submission limit and author-change rules. AAAI-27 limits each author to 10 combined main-technical-track submissions (the AI Alignment and AI for Social Impact special tracks are excluded from that count), allows no author additions after submission, and permits modifications only until the full-paper deadline.
Check multiple-submission compliance. An AAAI submission under review cannot simultaneously be under review at another archival venue, and AAAI-27 names the patterns it treats as violations: cosmetic re-submission, "thin slicing" one contribution across papers, splitting results by method/dataset/domain, and obfuscated or "alternative universe" duplicates. Papers sharing authors may be assessed together for novelty.
Apply the current AAAI AI-use policy: editing/polishing author-written text may be allowed, but LLM-generated manuscript text, AI authorship, and AI-generated citations are policy risks.

Blocking risks

Over-limit technical content or malformed PDF.
Missing reproducibility checklist.
Identity leakage in paper, supplement, links, code, data, or prior-work citations.
Author added after the allowed window.
Concurrent archival submission.
Web pointers to mutable supplementary material.
Policy-violating LLM-generated text, hallucinated references, or plagiarism.

Summary-reject screen

AAAI's large reviewer pool and high volume mean a desk-level or Phase-1 cut is the most likely way to lose, so screen for the mechanical failures first.

Check	Fast-fail trigger	Where it bites
Page limit	technical content over the cap	desk return
Anonymity	author name in PDF, code, or metadata	policy reject
Checklist	missing or contradictory	Phase-1 distrust
Dual submission	concurrent archival venue	ethics reject

Pre-deadline evidence packet

Build a single review-version packet before the abstract deadline, then refresh it before final submission. The packet is not a substitute for the official instructions; it is a way to make the submission audit reproducible and to keep late fixes from creating new policy problems.

Packet item	What to capture	Failure it prevents
Policy snapshot	current conference page, Author Kit, submission instructions, supplementary-material rules, and AI-use policy checked dates	applying a closed cycle's facts to the open one
PDF proof	page count, paper size, style file, checklist placement, font/figure warnings, and metadata scrub result	desk return for formatting or anonymity
Author ledger	OpenReview profiles, conflicts, subject areas, author-limit count, and author-list freeze status	profile conflict, over-limit author, late author change
Supplement ledger	every appendix, multimedia, code/data ZIP, README, license note, and anonymous link policy decision	mutable web pointer or identity leak
Ethics ledger	dual-submission status, human-subjects/data constraints, AI-use disclosure, plagiarism/citation check	policy reject after submission

For each item, record the evidence path and the person who can fix it. If a rule is uncertain, mark it as "requires current chair/author-kit confirmation" instead of guessing.

Anonymity sweep order

Run anonymity checks in a fixed order so fixes do not reintroduce leaks:

PDF text: names, affiliations, acknowledgments, grants, self-identifying project names, and obvious self-citations.
PDF metadata: title, author, producer, comments, embedded attachments, and file name.
References: prior work phrased as "our previous" or "submitted to" when blind citation would be required.
Supplement: ZIP names, directory names, notebooks, comments, plots, data paths, license files, and executable logs.
External references: GitHub, project pages, anonymous archives, videos, demos, or issue trackers.
OpenReview metadata: author list, conflicts, subject areas, institutional hints in abstract or keywords.

The output should separate "must fix before submission" from "acceptable but document why." Do not rely on a single manual skim; use PDF metadata tools, archive listing, and text search when available.

Worked vignette

A robotics-learning team has 7 strong technical pages but left an acknowledgments line and a GitHub URL with their lab name in the supplement. The audit flags anonymity as the highest summary-reject risk: the fix order is strip the acknowledgment, replace the link with an anonymous archive, scrub ZIP metadata, then re-export and re-run the anonymity sweep before the paper deadline.

Output format

[AAAI readiness] Ready / Needs fixes / Not ready
[Track] Main / AI for Social Impact / AI Alignment / other
[Blocking checks] <page/anonymity/checklist/supplement/author-limit/dual-submission/AI-policy>
[Highest summary-reject risk] <one issue>
[Fix order] <ordered fixes before submission>

aaai-submission

AAAI Submission

Submission audit