brycewang-stanford CVPR Camera-Ready
Use this after a CVPR acceptance (decisions landed February 20 in the 2026 cycle, conference in early June). The verified 2026 publication pipeline is described below; the mechanical camera-ready details for any given year — exact deadline, page allowance, IEEE forms — were not fetchable at check time and are 待核实: read the instructions email and the current Author Guidelines before building the final PDF.
Where the paper actually ends up
Accepted CVPR papers are published twice, and the two copies serve different audiences:
- CVF open access (
openaccess.thecvf.com): free to everyone, posted around the conference; the file is the accepted version apart from a watermark. This is the copy the field reads and the one bibliography tools usually find first. - IEEE Xplore: the version of record, under IEEE Computer Society co-sponsorship. Institutional reporting and some citation databases key off this one.
There is no author-side publication fee; costs ride on registration. Consequence for you: the PDF you upload at camera-ready is the artifact of record in both channels — there is no copy-editing pass to catch your mistakes.
De-anonymization without breakage
Reversing double-blind is edit work, not a switch:
- Restore authors, affiliations, and emails in the final class-file mode.
- Write real acknowledgements (grants, compute donors) — banned during review, expected now.
- Convert third-person self-citations back where the prose became misleading ("[12] showed" → "we showed in [12]" only where it clarifies lineage).
- Replace every "anonymous supplementary" pointer with live URLs: code repo, project page, dataset host. Links were banned at submission; the camera-ready is where they belong.
- Rebuild and re-read — de-anonymization routinely reflows line breaks and can push a tight page over whatever the final-version limit is that year.
The dataset clause has a deadline
Verified 2026 policy: if the paper claims a dataset release as a scientific contribution, the dataset must be publicly available no later than the camera-ready deadline. "Available upon request" or a landing page with a form does not meet the bar you promised reviewers. Licensing, hosting bandwidth, and consent/PII scrubbing all have to be finished on the paper's schedule, not the lab's.
# Release-readiness probe, run from a machine outside your institution
curl -sIL https://<dataset-host>/<archive> | grep -Ei 'HTTP|content-length'
sha256sum downloaded_archive.tar.gz # matches the checksum printed in the repo?
python3 - <<'EOF'
import json; m = json.load(open("meta/license.json"))
assert m["license"] and m["contact"], "license/contact missing from release metadata"
EOF
Oral, highlight, or poster: what changes
In 2026 the program split acceptances into tiers (program trackers reported 141 orals in four parallel tracks and 578 highlights among 4,090 acceptances — cross-check the official program before quoting). What each tier means for preparation:
| Outcome | Extra deliverables | Preparation reality |
|---|---|---|
| Oral | Talk + poster | A few minutes on a big stage; rehearse to time, design slides for the back row |
| Highlight | Poster, flagged in the program | Extra foot traffic; the poster must carry the paper alone |
| Poster | Poster | Thousands of attendees walk the halls; a legible headline result beats density |
| Award candidate | Talk logistics vary | Committee re-reads the paper — camera-ready polish matters twice |
Every tier presents at a venue with five-digit attendance (about 12,200 registrants in 2026), so print deadlines, poster-size specs, and the video/teaser uploads requested by the virtual platform belong on the same checklist as the PDF.
Final-PDF quality assurance
The version of record gets no editorial pass, so run your own. Faults found in published CVPR PDFs year after year, all preventable in an afternoon:
- Rebuttal-promised changes never applied — diff the rebuttal's commitments ("we will cite [Foo]", "we will clarify the protocol") against the final text, item by item.
- Reviewer-visible numbers silently changed. If a table improved after acceptance (bug fix, longer training), say so in a footnote; unexplained deltas between the reviewed and published versions are the stuff of integrity threads.
- Camera-ready line numbers left on, draft watermarks, or
\usepackage{review}-mode artifacts from the author kit. - Broken cross-references from late figure surgery (
Fig. ??), and citations still pointing to arXiv versions of papers that have since been published (fix percvpr-related-work). - Author metadata: the OpenReview record, the PDF author block, and the form you file with the publisher must agree on names, order, and affiliations — mismatches propagate to IEEE Xplore and are painful to correct later.
Synchronizing the public record
After acceptance, converge the copies: update the arXiv version to match the camera-ready (arXiv posting was already legal during review), point the repo README at the CVF page once it exists, and use one canonical BibTeX everywhere — mixed arXiv/proceedings citations fragment your citation count for years. Keep the media embargo in mind in reverse: it lifted at acceptance, so coordinated publicity is now allowed.
Reverify each cycle (all 待核实 for the current year)
- Camera-ready deadline, final page allowance, and whether an extra page is granted.
- Whether the final template differs from the submission template (line numbers off, copyright block on).
- IEEE copyright/e-forms and PDF validation requirements.
- Registration-per-paper and in-person presentation obligations.
- Poster dimensions, talk lengths, and virtual-platform upload list.
Output format
[Camera-ready status] on-track / blocked
[Version-of-record checks] deanonymized · acknowledgements · live links · page fit
[Dataset clause] not-claimed / released-and-probed / BLOCKED: <gap>
[Tier prep] oral/highlight/poster deliverables and dates
[Public sync] arXiv updated · repo pointed · canonical BibTeX chosen
[待核实 items] <forms, deadline, page allowance for this year>