[belval]

> How many times has this happened?

Not commenting on this specific case, but presenting your work as novel when there is a pile of pre-existing art is pretty common in ML/AI. Some of it is due to trying to get into conferences, but a fair share of it is also due to the sheer number of papers getting published. It can be legitimately difficult to read from the firehose of paper and understand whether your approach was explored in the last 5 years.

EDIT: Reading the blog and looking at the code, it does not pass the smell test for me, he wants them to cite an 8-month old GitHub package (no pre-print/published paper) with 19 stars? This is the equivalent of a patent troll for academic papers. The basic idea is not even novel, using judges to judge your judges goes back to at least a few years.

[keskival]

It is almost impossible to proactively find existing art conclusively. However, this wasn't my expectation in this case. I would just like them to correct the facts in their preprint, and add a citation which is missing. They refused to do that.

If you know a reference to an even more prior mention of meta-judges, please let me know. I am happy to add references to the repository.

Very typically authors write "to our knowledge novel method", which is fine, but in this case the authors cannot write even that if they know the method isn't novel now.