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The reviewers have already commented on our article and the conference management system shows us each of their comments. Based on the comments, we know that the article will definitely be rejected. The final verdict is scheduled on 15 days from today.
We are interested in improving (based on the presently seen reviews) the manuscript and submitting it to another venue.
Will it be called duplicate submission in the new venue, if we submit now?
Formally, yes. Until you have actually received the accept/reject decision, your paper is still under submission and cannot be submitted elsewhere.
On the other hand, you can avoid this conflict (at least in principle) by formally withdrawing your original submission. Normally I would advise against withdrawing so late, since you'd arguably be wasting the PC's time. But if the work has already been done and the outcome is clear, the PC is just wasting your time by making you wait two weeks for the official decision.
If you do withdraw and submit elsewhere before results of the first conference are announced, you should make the situation very clear to the new PC chair. In particular, you should forward the formal acknowledgment of your withdrawal. There is a nontrivial chance that the two PCs overlap, and that someone will flag the "dual submission" without realizing that it was withdrawn.
Finally: If the reviews are so obviously negative, you might consider giving yourself more than 15 days to improve the paper before submitting again.
This question is bound to come up more frequently with the advent of rebuttal phases in major conferences. In such a system, authors get the comments, and sometimes the preliminary accept / reject votes, a little in advance to allow them to write an answer to the reviews, which is then - at least in theory - taken into account for the final decision. In such a system, it's fairly obvious when a paper is dead, and waiting for the final verdict is a waste of time in that case.
I don't think there is already a generally-understood moral code on whether you need to wait for the final rejection before submitting again. Formally withdrawing, as JeffE proposes, is a possibility, but given that the paper is, for all practical purposes, dead, a withdrawal seems to only add overhead at this point. Personally, I suspect a busy PC chair will just ignore your mail at this point.
Hence, I would not consider it a double-submission to immediately resubmit the paper. Just think of the paper as rejected and carry on. Note that this advice only holds if it is glaringly obvious that the paper will be rejected. Don't interpret this as permission to speculate if the reviews could still go either way, especially if the conference only gives you the textual comments but not the verdicts. Further, should your paper miraculously be accepted in the first conference anyway, you need to immediately withdraw from the second review process.
