brycewang-stanford CVPR Workflow
CVPR is an annual machine with one intake: in the 2026 cycle, abstracts November 6, papers November 13, supplements November 20, rebuttal late January, decisions February 20, conference June 3–7 in Denver. This skill turns that spine into a project plan with owners, because CVPR deadline weeks are lost to coordination failures more often than to science failures.
Campaign calendar (2026-cycle anchors)
| When | Milestone | Owner discipline |
|---|---|---|
| T–10 weeks (early Sep) | Freeze scope: claims, benchmarks, baselines | PI + first author sign one paragraph |
| T–8 weeks | Experiment matrix running; recipe ledger live | Every table row has a config |
| T–6 weeks | First full draft; flip-test the figures | Co-authors annotate, don't rewrite |
| T–4 weeks (early Oct) | OpenReview profiles audited for every author | One named owner; new coauthors close the list |
| T–1 week (Nov 6) | Abstract registered; profiles valid | Desk-reject exposure if missed |
| Nov 13 | Paper + CRF submitted | Freeze 24h early; upload before the panic hour |
| Nov 20 | Supplement uploaded | Videos/code packaged per cvpr-supplementary |
| Dec – Jan 12 | Coauthors deliver their assigned reviews | Late reviews endanger your paper |
| Jan 22–29 | Reviews land; one-page rebuttal | Pre-book this week; nobody travels |
| Jan 30 – Feb 5 | Discussion (no author access) | Resist mailing the AC |
| Feb 20 | Decisions | Both branches pre-planned |
| Spring (待核实) | Camera-ready + dataset release due | See cvpr-camera-ready |
| Jun 3–7 | Conference (workshops 3–4, main 5–7 in 2026) | Poster/talk/travel logistics |
The two windows people fail to defend
Deadline fortnight (early November). The supplement trailing the paper by a week tempts teams to leave packaging "for week two" — then week two evaporates into video rendering and code scrubbing. Rule: the supplement plan (what goes in, who builds it) is written before the paper deadline; week two only executes it.
Rebuttal week (late January). Seven days, one page, all reviewers at once. Assign roles when reviews drop, not after a day of group grief:
# rebuttal-roles.yaml — filled within 12 hours of review release
reader: # summarizes all reviews neutrally, one page, no rebuttals yet
runner: # owns the 1-2 small requested experiments; hard stop at day 5
writer: # owns the single page; everyone else feeds bullets
adjudicator: # PI decides which objections get space, which get one line
deadline: # internal freeze 24h before OpenReview close
Reviewer duty as a planned workload
Submitting enrolls qualifying authors into a 25k-reviewer pool, and undelivered or irresponsible reviews can desk-reject every paper the offender authored (verified 2026 enforcement). Treat December–January reviewing as a scheduled deliverable: at submission time, list which coauthors are likely reviewers, block their calendar for review weeks, and have the group's senior authors sanity-check first-time reviewers' drafts against the official reviewer guidelines.
Multi-paper coordination
Most labs submit several papers into the same November wall, which multiplies the process risks nonlinearly:
- Shared coauthors, shared exposure: one person's undelivered January review endangers every paper they touch; the duty ledger must be lab-level, not paper-level.
- Conflict hygiene: OpenReview conflicts must be complete across all submissions; a stale institution on one profile pollutes assignments for the whole batch.
- Compute contention: rebuttal-week reserve GPU allocations collide when three papers each promised "small requested experiments"; pre-negotiate priority order.
- Internal review: schedule lab-mates' cross-reads at T–10, not T–2 — at T–2 everyone is defending their own draft.
The resubmission ladder
At a 25.42% acceptance rate, the rational plan covers rejection before it happens. The CV calendar offers a clean ladder — CVPR (Nov) → ICCV (spring deadline, odd years) / ECCV (spring deadline, even years) → WACV/3DV or back to CVPR. Rules for climbing:
- Bank the reviews: fix every factual objection before the next deadline; reviewer
pools overlap across CVF venues and repeat objections read badly (triage method in
cvpr-review-process). - Mind the dual-submission windows: the CVPR attestation covered Nov 13 – Feb 20 in 2026; the next venue's window must not overlap a paper still under CVPR review.
- Re-check freshness: three months of arXiv can obsolete a comparison table; budget a baseline-refresh pass, not just an edit pass.
Deadline fortnight, day by day
The last two weeks compress badly when run ad hoc. A schedule that has survived contact with real teams:
- T–14 to T–10: results freeze for the main table. New numbers after this go to the supplement or the rebuttal, not the body.
- T–10 to T–7: full-draft pass; run the figure flip test with an outsider; final baseline-freshness check against the leaderboard.
- T–7 (abstract day): register the abstract, verify every profile renders as complete when logged out of the authors' accounts, lock the author list.
- T–6 to T–3: claim-calibration pass (
cvpr-writing-style), bibliography venue verification (cvpr-related-work), CRF mandatory sections drafted. - T–2: full mechanical sweep from
cvpr-submission; internal freeze. - T–1: upload; re-download; cold read. Nobody edits after upload day.
- T to T+7 (supplement week): execute — do not design — the supplement plan; identity-scan code and videos; upload at T+5, not T+7, to survive a failed render.
Cycle-status note
As of 2026-07-08, CVPR 2026 has concluded and the CVPR 2027 cycle (Seattle, reported around June 20–24, 2027) had published no CFP or deadlines. Every date above is a 2026-cycle anchor for planning shape only — reopen cvpr.thecvf.com the moment your team commits, because the deadline chain (and things like the CRF) can change between editions.
Output format
[Campaign stage] scoping / building / deadline-fortnight / in-review / rebuttal / decided
[Calendar] next 3 milestones with dates and owners
[Duty ledger] reviewing coauthors + calendar blocked: yes/no
[Risk register] top 3 (missed-profile, supplement drift, rebuttal roles, …)
[Plan B] next venue + its verified deadline
[Cycle check] current-year pages reopened on: <date>