tacas-supplementary

TACAS Supplementary

Use this when assembling TACAS supplementary material. The governing rule: **the paper must be

judgeable from the reviewed pages alone.** The appendix, the supplementary website, and the artifact

support the paper; they do not hold the argument. Reviewers read supplementary material at their

discretion, so anything the decision depends on lives in the body.

What goes where

| Content | Body (within page limit) | Appendix / website / artifact |

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

| Problem, contribution, and the soundness claim | Yes | — |

| The core algorithm / tool architecture | Yes | Full pseudocode variants, extra config |

| The soundness argument | Theorem + proof sketch in body | Full proof in appendix |

| Headline benchmark results | Yes (key table) | Full per-benchmark tables, extra plots |

| Benchmark setup (machine, timeout, baseline) | Stated in body | Full logs, raw outputs |

| The tool itself + reproduction scripts | A pointer | The artifact (mandatory for tools) |

| Extra examples, secondary optimizations | Summary | Appendix / website |

If a reviewer would need to open the appendix or artifact to know whether the result is sound or the

comparison is fair, the paper is mis-partitioned — move that into the body.

The page-budget discipline

TACAS's llncs.cls budget (16 pages for research / case-study / regular tool; 6 pages for

tool-demonstration) excludes references and a clearly marked end appendix. Consequences:

• Keep the soundness claim, the core algorithm, and the headline comparison in the body — they

are decision-critical.

• Full proofs, per-benchmark tables, and secondary material go to the appendix (at the end,

clearly marked) or a supplementary website, with explicit forward references.

• Do not use the appendix or artifact to smuggle in a result that would not otherwise fit — an

argument that only closes with out-of-body material reads as unreviewable. Appendices are read at

the reviewer's discretion.

Category-appropriate anonymity of supplementary material

[Research (double-blind)]  appendix, website, and any review artifact must be anonymous: no authors,
                           affiliations, acks, grants, cluster paths, tool identity, or repo owners;
                           route the website through an anonymizing host
[Tool / case-study (single-blind)]  supplementary material is named; the tool identity is expected,
                           but still ship a clean archive (no credentials, no .git cruft)
[Clean archive]            no .git history, .DS_Store, credentials, caches, or huge irrelevant files
[Opens clean]              verify the appendix/website/artifact is navigable and the README orients a
                           reader in one minute

The mandatory-artifact interaction (tool and tool-demo papers)

For a regular tool or tool-demonstration paper the artifact is not "supplementary" in the

optional sense — it is a mandatory, evaluated deliverable submitted after the paper. Split so

that the body makes the paper judgeable and the artifact makes every claim reproducible; the two

must agree. See tacas-artifact-evaluation and tacas-reproducibility.

Vignette: splitting a research paper with a long proof

A paper with a new algorithm, a substantial soundness proof, and a large benchmark table: the body

keeps the algorithm, the theorem with a proof sketch, the key benchmark comparison with the setup

stated, and the external-validity limits; the appendix holds the full proof and the per-benchmark

tables; the (voluntary) artifact holds the tool and the scripts that regenerate the tables. Nothing

decision-critical — soundness or comparison fairness — lives only outside the body.

Output format

[Supplement status] ready / needs fixes / not ready
[Partition check] anything decision-critical (soundness/fairness) outside the body? <none / move: what>
[Page budget] body within 16/6 limit? references + appendix excluded correctly? yes/no
[Anonymity] (research) appendix/website/artifact clean of identity + metadata? passed/issues
[Body dependency] <what a reviewer can decide without opening the appendix/artifact>