The concept of Double Blind is gone, because papers are out on Arxiv the second work is done on them. Within a small research domain, everyone knows what the other person is working on.

You don't know the reviewers, but the reviewers often know who the authors are.

This isn't true at all. In AI, ML, NLP and Computer Vision, for example, conferences tend to be double blind. In robotics they tend to be single blind. Most people are not putting their work up on arxiv before publication, so you can't find that out either.

Often those double blind conferences contain explicit exceptions that let you post on Arxiv. Check the Call for Papers from this year's NeurIPS for example. Obviously you aren't required to put anything on Arxiv, but lots of people want to stake their territory and will post either a preprint or an incomplete version of the paper (e.g. with an example missing).

> In robotics they tend to be single blind.

I just wanted to point out that this does vary a little bit. RSS was double blind this year but ICRA was single blind last I checked.

The NeurIPS exemption isn't specific to arxiv: "The existence of non-anonymous preprints (on arXiv, social media, websites, etc.) will not result in rejection" People can post anywhere. Most people don't. I don't check carefully, and as I reviewer I explicitly don't look, but when I do see a preprint it's rarely any different from the submitted version. People do stake out territory, but it's more like they do that with shitty papers that no one wants to accept but they want to "own" some phrase that might be popular in the future. The NLP community is very unhappy about this in particular.

> I just wanted to point out that this does vary a little bit. RSS was double blind this year but ICRA was single blind last I checked.

It has been this way for a few years now. RSS & CoRL are double blind, ICRA and IROS are single-blind. I can't think of the last time I submitted to an ML, AI, NLP, or vision conference that wasn't double blind. It's sort of a strange robotics thing :)

Depends on the author. Some people don't post to arXiv until after they've submitted, or after they've gotten initial reviews back. Others like to post to arXiv proactively to get feedback prior to submitting. Just depends on the person.

Reviewers are encouraged not to read anything that might be such a paper, though, for whatever that's worth.

of course it can’t be avoided completely, but you’re supposed to try not to know who the authors are.