Stoc Reproducibility

STOC Reproducibility

For a proofs-only venue, "reproducible" means a third party can verify every claimed theorem without contacting the authors. STOC's structure makes this a two-document problem that pure-appendix venues do not have: the committee reads a 12-page guaranteed window, the community reads the arXiv/ECCC full version, and the paper is only as checkable as the pair is consistent. No checklist form enforces any of this — the STOC 2026 CFP contains none (checked 2026-07-08) — so the discipline below is self-imposed or absent.

Statement drift: the STOC-specific failure

Whenever the same theorem exists in two documents, the versions decay apart: a hypothesis strengthened during a proof repair gets updated in one file only; a constant improves in the full version while the abstract still advertises the old one; numbering shifts and cross-references silently point at the wrong lemma. Drift is not cosmetic — a reader who finds Theorem 2's statement differing between the proceedings and arXiv cannot tell which one is proved.

The mechanical cure is a single-source build: one repository of statement files included by both documents, so a statement physically cannot fork.

% statements/thm-main.tex  (the only copy of the claim, ever)
\begin{theorem}[Main; restated in the full version as Theorem~\ref{thm:main}]
\label{thm:main}
Under Assumption~\ref{ass:degree}, there is a deterministic
$O(m \log^{3} n)$-time algorithm computing a $(1+\varepsilon)$-approximate
solution for every fixed $\varepsilon > 0$.
\end{theorem}

% extended-abstract.tex          % full-version.tex
\input{statements/thm-main}      % \input{statements/thm-main}
\begin{proofsketch} ... \end{proofsketch}   % \begin{proof} ... \end{proof}

An \iffull toggle in a shared preamble achieves the same with one master file; either way, the invariant is one copy of every statement on disk.

Checkability audit before submission

Computation that claims depend on

If any theorem rests on a machine check (case enumeration, solver certificate, verified numerics), reproducibility requirements sharpen from "nice" to "load-bearing":

• Determinism: the run must be exactly repeatable — fixed enumeration order, no wall-clock cutoffs deciding mathematical facts, solver versions pinned.
• Independence: publish the certificate and a separate checker, so trust does not reduce to trusting your search program (see stoc-artifact-evaluation for packaging mechanics).
• Description: the paper itself must specify the computation precisely enough that someone could rewrite it from scratch; code is evidence, prose is the specification.

Illustrative-only plots and timing anecdotes carry no proof weight and need only honesty: seed and instance disclosure, no claims beyond what is proved (stoc-experiments covers when to include them at all).

Verification workflow for the author team

1. Freeze statements four weeks out; from then on, statement edits require a team-visible diff, because every edit can invalidate a downstream proof.
2. Assign each theorem a verifier who did not write its proof; record pass/fail per proof section, and treat any "I believe it but cannot check line 5" as a fail.
3. Grep both documents for confessions: wlog, clearly, standard, similar, it is easy to see — each hit either survives justification or gets expanded.
4. Re-derive the main constant chain once, by hand, on paper, from the final text only. This catches the strengthened-hypothesis-updated-once bug that review will otherwise catch for you.
5. After camera-ready, keep the full version live-maintained: arXiv revision with a dated changelog is the community's accepted correction channel.

Vignette: how drift actually happens

A team submits in November with Theorem 2 requiring subgaussian noise. In December a reviewer-anticipating coauthor realizes the proof of Lemma 7 uses a fourth-moment bound that subgaussianity gives but the written hypothesis does not state; she patches the full-version draft to "subgaussian with parameter $\sigma$" and adjusts two constants. The extended abstract is not touched — nobody is editing a submitted file. At camera-ready in March, the proceedings version is produced from the submitted sources, and the published extended abstract now states a theorem the team knows is proved only under the amended hypothesis. Nothing dishonest happened at any step; the pipeline had two copies of one statement and no synchronization rule. The single-source layout above makes this sequence structurally impossible, which is why it is worth the Makefile friction.

Cycle-volatility warnings

• If a future CFP introduces any structured checklist, code policy, or supplementary channel, it will say so; the 2026 cycle had none (待核实 yearly).
• The 12-page guaranteed window and the full-version expectation are 2026 wording; both shape where proofs must live, so re-read the live CFP before restructuring.

Output format

[Checkability verdict] verifiable end-to-end / gaps found
[Statement-drift control] single-source / manual sync (risk) / diverged <- fix
[Hypothesis visibility] clean / hidden conditions at: <list>
[External results] all hypothesis-checked / unchecked: <citations>
[Load-bearing computation] none / deterministic + certified / unreproducible <- blocker

Source: brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills → STOC-Skills/skills/stoc-reproducibility/SKILL.md