system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
How to refer my previous work without breaking double blind review process?

I'm about to submit a paper to a CS conference that has a double blind review process, and that rejects papers that expose the authors' identity in the text.

However, the work is an extension of a previous work we published last year in the same conference. We will be referring to that work a lot, write a similar problem formulation, show new results on the previous datasets, and in general it is clear that the current work extends the previous one and should be read with that in mind.

how should I refer to the previous work throughout the paper? I find it hard to believe the reviewers won't guess that the work is from the same lab, and don't want to be rejected solely because of that.
gpt
It is a bit difficult to manage, but you have to write the paper as if that previous work was someone else's.   While that seems like an unnecessarily burden, this paper must stand on its own regardless of whose work it builds upon, so it's a good practice to think that way even when the process is not blind.