We got unlucky with 1 of 3 reviewers for AAAI 2020 and got rejected, we feel like our paper was rejected based on one reviewer who, it seems, did not take the time to read the paper. We wanted to resubmit to IJCAI and I just now saw that the rules for resubmissions have changed drastically…

IJCAI 19: Authors of declined AAAI-19 submissions […]. At the discretion of the authors, the resubmission can be accompanied by all three of the following, as a single file […] (No mention of what happens if none of this is provided.)

IJCAI 20: Authors of papers that have been rejected from AAAI 2020, ECAI 2020, AAMAS 2020, ICCV 2020, or ICAPS 2020 […]. Such resubmissions must contain, in a single PDF file […] A paper rejected from these conferences and omitting to declare resubmission will be directly rejected without further review.

Does anyone know what’s going on here? We did not change anything on the method (we improved some of the explanations and added just one small tables in results).

Will the reviewers now see the previous reviews? Will it be given to the same reviewers?

Why is IJCA 19 not in the list? Is this a thing now that you have to wait 1 year to resubmit a paper?