podc-review-process

PODC Review Process

Model the pipeline before interpreting any single review. PODC's process is **proofs-first and

single-shot**: a specialized program committee reads your model and your proof, and the decision is

accept or reject — there is no Major Revision, no journal-style R&R. The most consequential

mental shift for authors arriving from a software-engineering or ML venue is that there is no second

read to fix a gap in; everything that would go into a revision must be in the initial submission.

Process model

• Submission and review run on HotCRP with lightweight double-blind anonymity: identities

are hidden from reviewers (no author names/affiliations/emails in the submission), a change from

PODC's historically single-blind practice.

• Each paper is read by program-committee members (often with external subreviewers for specific

subareas) who weigh: the significance of the result, the correctness of the proof, the

precision and honesty of the model/assumptions, novelty against known bounds, and clarity.

• The committee reads the abstract and the first 10 pages as guaranteed; deeper proofs are read

at its discretion — so the merits case must land in those pages (podc-supplementary).

• Decisions are accept / reject. Accepted regular papers publish in the ACM proceedings (≤10

pages); Brief Announcements (≤3 pages) are a separate, lighter-bar track.

• There is typically no revision round; whether a rebuttal / author-response phase runs

varies by cycle (待核实 for 2026 — confirm on the call).

What a PODC reviewer actually checks

| Dimension | The reviewer's question | How to pass it |

|---|---|---|

| Correctness | Does the proof close in the stated model? | Self-contained proofs; no assumption creep |

| Significance | Does this advance a problem the community cares about? | Position against the closest known bounds |

| Model honesty | Are the timing/fault/adversary assumptions declared and consistent? | An explicit model box the proofs never violate |

| Novelty | Is the result / technique new relative to PODC/DISC/journals? | A precise delta, not a topic list |

| Tightness | Is an "optimal" claim backed by a matching lower bound? | Prove or cite the lower bound, or don't claim optimal |

A reviewer who finds a proof gap or an undeclared assumption will reject on soundness, and

there is no revision to repair it — which is why podc-experiments (the assumption audit) and

podc-reproducibility (self-contained proofs) are pre-submission, not post-notification, work.

How PODC differs from its siblings

• vs. DISC: DISC is the other distributed-theory flagship (EATCS, LIPIcs proceedings, fall

cycle) and shares the Dijkstra Prize and Dissertation Award with PODC. The review culture is

close; the differences are calendar, proceedings format, and community center of gravity, not the

proofs-first bar.

• vs. SPAA: SPAA centers parallel computation; a message-passing fault-tolerance result is

native at PODC and a visitor at SPAA (and vice versa for shared-memory throughput/scheduling).

• vs. STOC/FOCS/SODA: these judge sequential algorithms and complexity; a PODC paper's value

must live in the distributed difficulty (faults, asynchrony, locality, concurrency) or it will

be read as a mislabeled sequential result.

• vs. software-engineering / ML venues: no artifact evaluation, no rebuttal-driven Major

Revision, no empirical-benchmark culture. The object of review is the proof.

Where author leverage actually exists

[Before submission]  topic tags + a precise abstract -> reviewers who know your model   (largest lever)
[Track choice]       regular vs. Brief Announcement -> match the bar to the result's completeness
[In the submission]  a self-contained proof and an honest model box -> pre-empt the soundness reject
[Rebuttal, if any]   correct a factual misreading or supply a missing lemma/bound (待核实 it exists)
[After reject]       no appeal; revise the proof and reroute to DISC/SPAA/a focused venue or a journal

Because there is no revision round, the leverage is almost entirely pre-submission. The single

highest-value action is closing every proof and declaring every assumption before 16 February.

Reading a decision

| Outcome | What it means | Author move |

|---|---|---|

| Accept | Result, proof, and model hold | Camera-ready (≤10 pages) + arXiv full version; do not weaken claims |

| Accept as Brief Announcement (if offered) | The idea is valued but not a full regular paper this cycle | Publish the ≤3-page BA; develop the full paper for a later venue |

| Reject — soundness | A proof gap or undeclared assumption | Fix the proof; do not resubmit unchanged |

| Reject — significance/novelty | Known bound, or the delta is too small | Strengthen (a matching lower bound?) or reroute |

Misreadings to avoid

• Expecting a revision round — there is none; the submission is the whole case.
• Treating a preprint as forbidden — arXiv posting is allowed; only concurrent submission

elsewhere is the dual-submission problem.

• Assuming a rebuttal exists — confirm per cycle (待核实 for 2026).
• Under- or over-anonymizing — follow the lightweight double-blind wording, neither leaking

identity nor stripping citations.

Output format

[Process stage] pre-submission / under review / (rebuttal if any) / decided
[Anonymity model] lightweight double-blind — submission clean of author identity?
[Reviewer-axis map] each review point -> correctness | significance | model-honesty | novelty | tightness
[Leverage plan] the pre-submission or (rebuttal) action that can actually change the outcome
[Forbidden moves] identity leak / claiming a revision round that does not exist / unsupported optimality