NeurIPS 2026: Tips that might convince AC? [D]

So our paper had very good initial reviews but one of the reviewers decreased now their score although we addressed 3 out of 4 weaknesses. There’s no further justification or something like “your results arise more issues”. It seems to be very annoying because why decreasing now and not having assigned the lower score beforehand. I wanted to ask to people that was accepted previously with “middle” scores from reviewers (avg 3.5 for example), because I guess that in those cases AC helped to push up the scores. Did you focus more on the meta review? Was your AC talkative with you, or forcing the reviewers to engage? Our AC has been silent since the meta review but I guess that maybe they are busy with other papers