Looking at the differences between the rejected and accepted papers, I don't think it's quite a matter of 'avoiding citations'. The changes seem to break along two lines.
1. Avoid overly general citations. The rejected paper leads with references to image captioning tasks in general and visual question-answering, neither of which is directly advanced by the described study. The accepted paper avoids these general citations in favour of more specific literature that works directly on the image-comparison task.
2. Don't lead with citations. The accepted paper has its citations at the end of the introduction, on page 2.
I think that each change is reasonably justified.
In avoiding overly-general citations, the common practice in machine learning literature is to publish short papers (10 pages or fewer for the main body), and column inches spent in an exhaustive literature review are inches not spent clearly describing the new study.
Placing citations towards the end of the introduction is consistent with the "inverted pyramid" school of writing, most commonly seen in journalism. Leaving the review process out of it for the moment, an ordinary researcher reading the article probably would rather know what the paper is claiming more than what the paper is citing. A page-one that can tell a reader whether they'll be interested in the rest of the article does readers a service.
1. Avoid overly general citations. The rejected paper leads with references to image captioning tasks in general and visual question-answering, neither of which is directly advanced by the described study. The accepted paper avoids these general citations in favour of more specific literature that works directly on the image-comparison task.
2. Don't lead with citations. The accepted paper has its citations at the end of the introduction, on page 2.
I think that each change is reasonably justified.
In avoiding overly-general citations, the common practice in machine learning literature is to publish short papers (10 pages or fewer for the main body), and column inches spent in an exhaustive literature review are inches not spent clearly describing the new study.
Placing citations towards the end of the introduction is consistent with the "inverted pyramid" school of writing, most commonly seen in journalism. Leaving the review process out of it for the moment, an ordinary researcher reading the article probably would rather know what the paper is claiming more than what the paper is citing. A page-one that can tell a reader whether they'll be interested in the rest of the article does readers a service.