Colm Workflow

COLM Workflow

COLM gives you exactly one shot per year: one deadline (late March in 2026), one rebuttal, one decision (early July), one October stage. Campaign planning is therefore mostly backward induction from March — and, because LM projects burn compute and involve many hands, the critical path is usually GPUs and co-author availability, not writing.

The 2026 cycle as a template (all dates verified 2026-07-08)

Live-phase note: on this pack's access date — 2026-07-08 — the 2026 cycle is at decision day. If that is you, jump to colm-camera-ready or the reject branch in colm-review-process. If you are planning fresh work, you are planning COLM 2027: dates unannounced (待核实), with late March the reasonable working assumption to be corrected the moment colmweb.org posts the real calendar.

Backward plan from a March deadline

T-20w (Nov)  route the project (colm-topic-selection); if COLM, freeze the
             one-sentence finding and the evaluation design — contamination
             handling decided NOW, not retrofitted (colm-experiments)
T-16w (Dec)  compute budget locked: training runs, eval sweeps, API spend;
             book cluster time — March demand is when everyone else trains too
T-12w (Jan)  main experiments running; pinning discipline live from day one
             (colm-reproducibility); related-work lanes assigned (colm-related-work)
T-8w  (Feb)  full draft v1; internal red-team review against the four attacks;
             OpenReview profiles + reciprocal-reviewer map done when the venue opens
T-4w  (Mar)  freeze claims; kill or hedge anything unverified; build the
             anonymized package (colm-supplementary)
T-1w         abstract in (Mar 26); mechanical sweeps; co-author policy items
T-0   (Mar 31) upload; re-download; read cold

Two LM-specific scheduling truths: evaluation takes as long as training once you include prompt-sensitivity runs, multiple families, and CI-grade sampling — budget it explicitly; and the February cluster crunch is real — every LM group targets the same spring deadlines, so compute reserved in December is worth double compute begged for in March.

Coordination artifacts for a multi-author LM paper

• A claims ledger — every claim, its owner, its evidence status (verified / running / at-risk). The T-4w freeze operates on this ledger.
• A reciprocal-reviewing map — who is nominated for which submission across the whole group's March portfolio; the same person cannot cover two papers, and anyone on 4+ submissions is drafted into the pool regardless.
• A policy checklist per co-author — OpenReview profile, Code of Ethics acknowledgment, LLM-usage disclosure input. These are the tasks only their owners can do, which is what makes them deadline risks.
• A decision-tree memo written before July: if accept → who runs camera-ready and the artifact release in the August-vacation month; if reject → target venue (autumn ICLR? next NeurIPS? COLM 2027?) and which review criticisms gate the resubmission.

Slotting COLM into the venue year

COLM's March deadline sits after the ICLR decision (winter) and before the NeurIPS deadline (spring), which creates the standard LM-group rotation: ICLR reject → strengthen → COLM; COLM reject (July) → strengthen → ICLR (autumn). Use the rotation deliberately, with colm-topic-selection as the gate each time — a paper bouncing between venues unchanged is not a strategy, it is a queue.

The small-lab variant

The plan above assumes a group; a two-person or advisor-student team runs the same calendar with different bottlenecks:

The compensating advantage: small teams pivot. If January experiments kill the framing, a two-person team can re-route to a workshop or the autumn cycle without a committee meeting — take that exit deliberately rather than limping to March.

Failure patterns this calendar produces

• Evaluation designed after training finishes → contamination handling becomes an apology instead of a design (start it at T-20w).
• Abstract stub on March 26 → bad reviewer matching that no rebuttal can fix.
• Rebuttal window discovered at review-release → the 18 days start with three days of panic; pre-assign owners in March.
• August camera-ready month colliding with vacations → name the owner in July.

Workshop track as a parallel lane

COLM's workshop day (October 9 in 2026) runs its own later calendar — in 2026, workshop proposals were due April 14, and contributed workshop papers had a suggested June 23 deadline with mandatory notification by July 24. For work that misses March or is not archival-ready, the workshop lane keeps the project inside the COLM community's October gathering without burning the main-track shot — and a workshop audience in October is the best red team a March 2027 main-track version will ever get. Check each workshop's own pages; their deadlines and archival status vary (待核实 per workshop).

Output format

[Target cycle] COLM 202X — deadline <confirmed / working assumption 待核实>
[Phase now] <planning / experiments / freeze / submitted / rebuttal / decision / camera-ready>
[Critical path] <compute / evaluation / writing / co-author policy items>
[Ledger health] claims verified <k>/<n>; at-risk: <items>
[Group constraints] reciprocal map ▢  4+-submission authors: <names>
[Next milestone] <date — what must be true>