The moment a paper's score lands in the 2/3/3 range at NeurIPS, a peculiar math takes over. The numbers feel definitive, even when they aren't. For the researcher who posted this question, the calculation is practical: why gamble another cycle on ICLR or CVPR when a solid journal could give the work a home? That logic is understandable, but it also reveals a misconception about what those scores actually measure. A 2/3/3 at NeurIPS is not a verdict on your contribution's worth; it is a snapshot of a highly stochastic review process where a single unenthusiastic reviewer can outweigh two who saw merit. The gap between a reject and a borderline accept is often a matter of timing, reviewer assignment, and the mood of a rebuttal, not the inherent quality of the idea.
What stands out here is the assumption that a journal like *Neurocomputing* or *Knowledge-Based Systems* is the easier fallback. That assumption deserves scrutiny. Top-tier conferences and mid-tier journals operate on different currencies. Conferences reward novelty and tight, compelling narratives. Journals, even those a step below TPAMI or IJCV, reward completeness, rigorous experimentation, and a depth of analysis that a six-page format simply cannot contain. The reviewer pools are also different. A journal reviewer might ask for three rounds of revisions that take a year, not because the paper is flawed, but because they want to see a level of exhaustive evaluation that conference deadlines make impossible. The question is not whether the acceptance bar is lower; it is whether the paper, as a piece of sustained work, can withstand a process that punishes thinness.
For a paper on attention mechanisms for Vision Transformers, the choice of venue matters more than the raw scores. The modification to the attention module is precisely the kind of contribution that can get lost in a crowded conference cycle, but it can shine in a journal, where reviewers have the space to appreciate the nuance. However, that also means the bar shifts. A conference paper can get away with a clever idea and a few ablations. A journal paper needs to answer the "so what" question with a persistence that can feel relentless. The practical advice here is not to ask which journal is easiest, but which one matches the paper's depth. *Pattern Recognition* and *Neural Networks* have distinct editorial philosophies, and a paper that fits one might feel out of scope for the other. Read recent issues. Look at the types of experiments they expect. That is a better use of time than guessing at acceptance rates.
The deeper issue this post surfaces is the anxiety of the reject-and-resubmit loop. It is draining to pour months into a project and then face the prospect of starting over with a different venue, a different format, and a new set of reviewers who have no memory of your prior effort. But the answer is not to retreat to a journal out of fear. It is to be honest about the paper's ceiling. If the contribution is a small, incremental improvement to an attention module, a mid-tier journal is a reasonable home. If the idea has legs, do not sell it short. A 2/3/3 at NeurIPS has produced papers that later became highly cited journal articles. The score is not the story; the work is. Choose the venue that lets the work be fully told, and let that be the deciding factor, not the fear of another rejection.