[artfulmink]

Honestly not quite a fair assumption. Some schools have students use neurips templates for class submissions (at least my graduate school did), and so these students may have just been using this format out of habit/familiarity.

[simplesamp]

Maybe. But the paper being exact nine pages (page limit of neurips this year) and being put on arxiv just a month after neurips deadline is too much of a coincidence.