DRPG (Decompose, Retrieve, Plan, Generate): An Agentic Framework for Academic Rebuttal

Peixuan Han, YingJie Yu, Jingjun Xu, Jiaxuan You


Abstract
Despite the growing adoption of large language models (LLMs) in scientific research workflows, automated support for academic rebuttal, a crucial step in academic communication and peer review, remains largely underexplored. Existing approaches typically rely on off-the-shelf LLMs or simple pipelines, which struggle with long-context understanding and often fail to produce targeted and persuasive responses. In this paper, we propose **DRPG**, an agentic framework for automatic academic rebuttal generation that operates through four steps: Decompose reviews into atomic concerns, Retrieve relevant evidence from the paper, Plan rebuttal strategies, and Generate responses accordingly. Notably, the Planner in DRPG reaches over 98% accuracy in identifying the most feasible rebuttal direction. Experiments on data from top-tier conferences demonstrate that DRPG significantly outperforms existing rebuttal pipelines and achieves performance beyond the average human level using only an 8B model. Our analysis further demonstrates the effectiveness of the planner design and its value in providing multi-perspective and explainable suggestions. We also showed that DRPG works well in a more complex multi-round setting. These results highlight the effectiveness of DRPG and its potential to provide high-quality rebuttal content and support the scaling of academic discussions.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-acl.2051
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, United States
Editors:
Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
Venue:
Findings
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
41232–41249
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.2051/
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Cite (ACL):
Peixuan Han, YingJie Yu, Jingjun Xu, and Jiaxuan You. 2026. DRPG (Decompose, Retrieve, Plan, Generate): An Agentic Framework for Academic Rebuttal. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026, pages 41232–41249, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
DRPG (Decompose, Retrieve, Plan, Generate): An Agentic Framework for Academic Rebuttal (Han et al., Findings 2026)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.2051.pdf
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