Author Guidelines

CMT submissions Website

https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/CVPR2020

Call for Papers

Important: Please note that the policies have been extensively updated from the 2019 version, including guidelines related to arXiv prior work, code submission, and research areas. 

Papers in the main technical program must describe high-quality, original research. Topics of interest include all aspects of computer vision and pattern recognition including, but not limited to

  • 3D computer vision   

  • Action and behavior recognition   

  • Adversarial learning, adversarial attack and defense methods

  • Biometrics, face, gesture, body pose

  • Computational photography, image and video synthesis   

  • Datasets and evaluation   

  • Efficient training and inference methods for networks   

  • Explainable AI, fairness, accountability, privacy, transparency and ethics in vision   

  • Image retrieval   

  • Low-level and physics-based vision   

  • Machine learning architectures and formulations   

  • Medical, biological and cell microscopy   

  • Motion and tracking   

  • Neural generative models, auto encoders, GANs  

  • Optimization and learning methods   

  • Recognition (object detection, categorization)   

  • Representation learning, deep learning   

  • Scene analysis and understanding   

  • Segmentation, grouping and shape   

  • Transfer, low-shot, semi- and un- supervised learning   

  • Video analysis and understanding   

  • Vision + language, vision + other modalities   

  • Vision applications and systems, vision for robotics and autonomous vehicles

  • Visual reasoning and logical representation


 

All submissions will be handled electronically. In addition to the main technical program, the conference will include Tutorials, Workshops, Demonstrations, and Exhibits. Submit proposals to the appropriate chair.

Important dates:

Paper Submission Deadline 

November 15, 2019 (11:59PM Pacific Time)

Supplementary Materials Deadline 

November 22, 2019 (11:59PM Pacific Time)

Reviews Released to Authors

February 1, 2020 (11:59PM Pacific Time)

Rebuttal Due

February 8, 2020 (11:59PM Pacific Time)

Final Decisions to Authors

February 23, 2020

Camera-Ready Deadline

March 30, 2020 (11:59PM Pacific Time)

Main Conference

June 16-18, 2020

* Submission date is fixed, no extension will be given. 

Policies

Review Process: By submitting a paper to CVPR, the authors agree to the review process and understand that papers are processed by the Toronto system to match each manuscript to the best possible area chairs and reviewers.

Confidentiality: The review process of CVPR is confidential. Reviewers are volunteers not part of the CVPR organisation and their efforts are greatly appreciated. The practice of keeping all information confidential during the review is part of the standard communication to all reviewers. Misuse of confidential information is a severe professional failure and appropriate measures will be taken when brought to the attention of CVPR organizers. It should be noted, however, that the organisation of CVPR is not and cannot be held responsible for the consequences when reviewers break confidentiality.

Conflict Responsibilities: It is the primary author's responsibility to ensure that all authors on their paper have registered their institutional conflicts into CMT3 (see details under Domain Conflicts below). If a paper is found to have an undeclared or incorrect institutional conflict, the paper may be summarily rejected. To avoid undeclared conflicts, the author list is considered to be final after the submission deadline and no changes are allowed for accepted papers.

Double blind review: CVPR reviewing is double blind, in that authors do not know the names of the area chair/reviewers of their papers, and the area chairs/reviewers cannot, beyond reasonable doubt, infer the names of the authors from the submission and the additional material. Avoid providing information that may identify the authors in the acknowledgments (e.g., co-workers and grant IDs) and in the supplemental material (e.g., titles in the movies, or attached papers). Avoid providing links to websites that identify the authors. Violation of any of these guidelines may lead to rejection without review. If you need to cite a different paper of yours that is being submitted concurrently to CVPR, the authors should (1) cite these papers; (2) argue in the body of your paper why your CVPR paper is non trivially different from these concurrent submissions; and (3) include anonymized versions of those papers in the supplemental material.

Plagiarism: Plagiarism consists of appropriating the words or results of another, without credit. CVPR 2020's policy on plagiarism is to refer suspected cases to the IEEE Intellectual Property office, which has an established mechanism for dealing with plagiarism and wide powers of excluding offending authors from future conferences and from IEEE journals. You can find information on this office, their procedures, and their definitions of five levels of plagiarism at this webpage. We will be actively checking for plagiarism. Furthermore, the paper matching system is quite accurate. As a result, it regularly happens that a paper containing plagiarized material goes to a reviewer from whom material was plagiarized; experience shows that such reviewers pursue plagiarism cases enthusiastically.

Dual/Double Submissions: The goals of CVPR are to publish exciting new work for the first time and to avoid duplicating the effort of reviewers.

By submitting a manuscript to CVPR, authors acknowledge that it has not been previously published or accepted for publication in substantially similar form in any peer-reviewed venue including journal, conference or workshop, or archival forum. Furthermore, no publication substantially similar in content has been or will be submitted to this or another conference, workshop, or journal during the review period. Violation of any of these conditions will lead to rejection, and will be reported to the other venue to which the submission was sent.

A publication, for the purposes of this policy, is defined to be a written work longer than four pages (excluding references) that was submitted for review by peers for either acceptance or rejection, and, after review, was accepted. In particular, this definition of publication does not depend upon whether such an accepted written work appears in a formal proceedings or whether the organizers declare that such work “counts as a publication”.

The above definition does not consider an arXiv.org paper as a publication because it cannot be rejected. It also excludes university technical reports which are typically not peer reviewed. However, this definition of publication does include peer-reviewed workshop papers, even if they do not appear in a proceedings, if their length is more than four pages (excluding citations). Given this definition, any submission to CVPR should not have substantial overlap with prior publications or other concurrent submissions.

A submission with substantial overlap is one that shares 20 percent or more material with previous or concurrently submitted publications. Authors are encouraged to contact the Program Chairs about clarifications on borderline cases.

Note that a technical report (departmental, arXiv.org, etc.) version of the submission that is put up without any form of direct peer-review is NOT considered prior art and should NOT be cited in the submission.

Attendance responsibilities: The authors agree that if the paper is accepted, at least one of the authors will register for the conference and present the paper there.

Publication: All accepted papers will be made publicly available by the Computer Vision Foundation (CVF) two weeks before the conference. Authors wishing to submit a patent understand that the paper's official public disclosure is two weeks before the conference or whenever the authors make it publicly available, whichever is first. The conference considers papers confidential until published two weeks before the conferences, but notes that multiple organizations will have access during the review and production processes, so those seeking patents should discuss filing dates with their IP council. The conference assumes no liability for early disclosures. More information about CVF is available at http://www.cv-foundation.org/.

Publicity, social media: Papers submitted to CVPR must not be discussed with the press until they have been officially accepted for publication. Work explicitly identified as an CVPR submission also may not be advertised on social media. Please see the FAQ below for more details. Violations may result in the paper being rejected or removed from the conference and proceedings.

Submission Guidelines

All submissions will be handled electronically via the conference's CMT Website. By submitting a paper, the authors agree to the policies stipulated in this website. The paper submission deadline is November 15, 2019. Supplementary material can be submitted until November 22, 2019.

Papers are limited to eight pages, including figures and tables, in the CVPR style. Additional pages containing only cited references are allowed. Please refer to the following files for detailed formatting instructions:

Papers that are not properly anonymized, or do not use the template, or have more than eight pages (excluding references) will be rejected without review.

1) Paper submission and review site:

Submission Site (bookmark or save this URL!)

Please make sure that your browser has cookies and Javascript enabled.

Please add "email@msr-cmt.org" to your list of safe senders (whitelist) to prevent important email announcements from being blocked by spam filters.

Log into CMT3 at https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com. If you do not see “2020 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)” in the conference list already, click on the “All Conferences” tab and find it there.

2) Setting up your profile: You can update your User Profile, Email, and Password by clicking on your name in the upper-right inside the Author Console and choosing the appropriate option under “General”.

3) Domain Conflicts: When you log in for the first time, you will be asked to enter your conflict domain information. You will not be able to submit any paper without entering this information. We need to ensure conflict-free reviewing of all papers. At any time, you can update this information by clicking on your name in the upper-right and entering “Domain Conflicts” under CVPR 2020.

It is the primary author's responsibility to ensure that all authors on their paper have registered their institutional conflicts into CMT3. Each author should list domains of all institutions they have worked for, or have had very close collaboration with, within the last 3 years (example: mit.edu; ox.ac.uk; microsoft.com). DO NOT enter the domain of email providers such as gmail.com. This institutional conflict information will be used in conjunction with prior authorship conflict information to resolve assignments to both reviewers and area chairs. If a paper is found to have an undeclared or incorrect institutional conflict, the paper may be summarily rejected.

4) Creating a paper submission: This step must be completed by the paper registration deadline. After this deadline, you will not be able to register new papers, but you will be able to edit the information for existing papers.

(a) Click the “+ Create new submission” button in the upper-left to create a new submission. There, you will be prompted to enter the title, abstract, authors, and subject areas. You are strongly encouraged to finalize the author list by the registration deadline.

(b) Check with your co-authors to make sure that: (1) you add them with their correct CMT3 email; and (2) they have entered their domain conflicts into CMT3 for CVPR 2020. If you add an author with an email that is not in CMT3 and the name and organization is not automatically filled, that means they are not yet in the system, and you should make sure to check that they do not already have an account under a different email before completing the requested information to add them.

(c) Enter subject (topic) areas for your paper. You must include at least one primary area. This information is used to help assign ACs and reviewers.

5) Paper Number

Once you have registered your paper (i.e. title/authors), you will be assigned a paper number. Insert this into the latex or word template before generating the pdf of your paper for submission. Papers submitted without a number may not be reviewed.

6) Submission Requirements:

The maximum size of the abstract is 4000 characters.

The paper must be PDF only (maximum 30MB). Make sure your paper meets the formatting and anonymity requirements described above.

The supplementary material can be either PDF or ZIP only (maximum 100MB).

7) Supplementary Material Submission: By the supplementary material deadline, the authors may optionally submit code and/or additional material that was ready at the time of paper submission but could not be included due to constraints of format or space. The authors should refer to the contents of the supplementary material appropriately in the paper. Reviewers will be encouraged to look at it, but are not obligated to do so.

Supplementary material may include videos, proofs, additional figures or tables, more detailed analysis of experiments presented in the paper, code, or a concurrent submission to CVPR or another conference. It may not include results on additional datasets, results obtained with an improved version of the method (e.g., following additional parameter tuning or training), or an updated or corrected version of the submission PDF. Papers with supplementary materials violating the guidelines may be summarily rejected.

8) Code Submission and Reproducibility: To improve reproducibility in AI research, we highly encourage authors to voluntarily submit their code as part of supplementary material. Authors should also use the Reproducibility Checklist as a guide for writing reproducible papers. Reviewers are encouraged to check the submitted code to ensure that the paper’s results are trustworthy and reproducible. The code should be anonymized, e.g., author names, institutions and licenses should be removed. We do not expect authors to submit private/sensitive data, only sufficient data to demonstrate the method. All code/data will be reviewed confidentially and kept private.

 

Detailed supplementary material guidelines:

(a) All supplementary material must be self-contained and zipped into a single file. The following document and media formats are allowed: avi, doc, docx, mp4, pdf, wmv. CMT imposes a 100MB limit on the size of this file. Note that you can update the file by uploading a new one (the old one will be deleted and replaced).

(b) The paper for review (PDF only) must be submitted first before the supplementary material (PDF or ZIP only) can be submitted. 

(c) Code can be submitted as part of the supplementary zip file or through anonymous Github repositories (include the link in a separate text file in the supplementary zip). The link should point to a branch that will not be modified after the submission deadline.

Rebuttal Instructions

After receiving the reviews, authors may optionally submit a rebuttal to address the reviewers' comments, which will be limited to a one page PDF file using the "CVPR 2020 Rebuttal Template".

The rebuttal must maintain anonymity and cannot include external links that reveal the author identity or circumvent the length restriction.

Responses longer than one page will simply not be reviewed. This includes responses where the margins and formatting are deemed to have been significantly altered from those specified by the style guide.

The author rebuttal is optional and is meant to provide you with an opportunity to rebut factual errors or to supply additional information requested by the reviewers. It is NOT intended to add new contributions (theorems, algorithms, experiments) that were absent in the original submission and NOT specifically requested by the reviewers. You may optionally add a figure, graph or proof to your rebuttal to better illustrate your answer to the reviewers' comments.

Per a passed 2018 PAMI-TC motion, reviewers should refrain from requesting significant additional experiments for the rebuttal, or penalize for lack of additional experiments. Authors should refrain from including new experimental results in the rebuttal, especially when not specifically requested to do so by the reviewers.

Author FAQs

About Submitting Papers

1.  How will I present my paper in the virtual format?
Since CVPR 2020 will be mostly or entirely online, authors of accepted papers will need to provide additional materials to support online access (see details below). Papers will be presented via pre-recorded video (5 minutes for orals and 1 minute for posters) as well as slides. There will also be a live Q&A session for each paper where authors can further engage with their audience via text/video chat.

2.  How and when do I upload my presentation materials?The website where you upload materials is https://video.vast.uccs.edu. The deadline for uploading all materials is now May 14. There are no longer separate deadlines for orals/posters or different paper IDs. We appreciate your patience as we work to finalize the details with our new vendor.  

3.  What presentation materials do authors need to upload?
The list of materials was emailed to authors and is also listed at the following link, along with a mock-up of how these will be used: http://cvpr2020.thecvf.com/sites/default/files/2020-04/CVPR2020-authors-online-content.pdf Note that providing these materials is mandatory. Authors that do not provide the material necessary for online access may have their papers removed from CVPR 2020. Permission for all of this material to be archived and distributed freely has already been granted under the IEEE copyright form

4.  Do I still need to upload a traditional poster PDF?
We are no longer requesting a poster upload (PDF of a traditional single-page poster, previously referred to as POSTER). Instead, we are only asking for PDF slides in the 16:9 aspect ratio, as this format will be easier to view on a webpage from both desktop and mobile devices. We recommend <= 10 slides, preferably the same or similar to slides used for the 1-minute AD_VIDEO, as a larger set of slides will be difficult to browse online. 

5.  Do I need to provide keywords?
Yes, keywords are now requested for indexing papers, so that attendees can easily find papers via keyword search. Please include up to 10 keywords, comma-separated, in a text file (may be truncated for display, so please sort in descending order of importance).

Q. Can we please have an extension on the deadline?
A. NO. And any incomplete submission or a submission not meeting required criteria will be deleted.

Q. Can we get my quota increased for the size of paper submission from 30 MB to something higher?
A. NO. We have set hard limits of 30MB (PDF Only) for paper submission and 100MB (PDF or ZIP only) for supplementary materials for submissions for review. As we are expecting many submissions, and as each reviewer is expected to review multiple papers, larger file downloads (and uploads) will tax the system and abilities of reviewers to get to the papers fast enough. Authors should consider adding hi-res images as supplementary material (see supplementary material guidelines).

Q. How do I delete Supplementary Material from the CMT site?
A. After you log in, in the "Author" console, you'll notice "Upload/Delete File" at the end of the supplementary file name. Click on that, and in the page that appears, you can click on the "Delete" button to remove the supplementary file. (Please note that you will not be able to delete the supplementary file after the supplementary material deadline.)

Q. Can we submit color images with our papers for review?
A. YES. Reviewers will get the exact pdf file of the paper you submitted, so they can see the color images on the screen. Do be warned though that many reviews still like to read printed papers and not all have access to high-end color printers. Please make sure to comment in the paper to request the reviewers to see the color online copy.

Q. What is CVPR 2020 policy on DUAL SUBMISSIONS?
A. Please read the dual/double submission paragraph above.

Q. Does a Technical Report (departmental, arXiv, etc.) available online count as a prior publication, and therefore is that work ineligible for review and publication at CVPR 2020?
A. Please read the dual/double submission paragraph above.

Q. Does a document on GitHub or other open repositories count as a publication, and therefore is ineligible for review and publication at CVPR 2020?
A. Submissions to GitHub and similar repositories cannot be rejected and are accepted by default before any "review" that can take place on such platforms. Given definitions in the dual/double submission paragraph above, GitHub documents are not publications and won't be treated as such. To preserve anonymity, you should not cite your public codebase. You can say that the code will be made publicly available.

Q. Does a presentation at a departmental seminar during the review period violate the anonymity standard or other CVPR 2020 policy?
A. NO. Authors must properly anonymize the written submission as per the guidelines. There is no requirement that the material otherwise be kept confidential during the review process.

Q. Can I promote my paper in the press or on social media?
A. As stated in the instructions above, authors are not allowed to go to the press with their submission prior to the end of the review process, or to advertise their work on social media while explicitly identifying it as an CVPR submission. In recent conference cycles, some authors were found posting about their submissions on Twitter or other social media, and even including the title or a snapshot of the paper. This is a violation of anonymity, since the message may go out to many potential reviewers.

Authors must not:

  • Talk to the media about your work as "in submission to CVPR"

  • Make any posts to social media or elsewhere that can be linked to a specific CVPR submission (e.g., mentioning the title of the submission or details and content and saying that it's an CVPR submission)

Authors may:

  • Talk about their work in a presentation without saying it's submitted to CVPR

  • Submit to arXiv without mentioning CVPR

A paper may be rejected if the program chairs feel that the authors have attempted to let potential reviewers know who wrote the paper.

Q. How do I cite my results reported in open challenges?
A. To conform with the double blind review policy, you can report results of other challenge participants together with your results in your paper. For your results, however, you should not identify yourself and should not mention your participation in the challenge. Instead present your results referring to the method proposed in your paper and draw conclusions based on the experimental comparison to other results.

Q. Does my submission need to cite arXiv papers that are related to my work?
A. Consistent with good academic practice, you need to cite all sources that inspired and informed your own work. This said, asking authors to thoroughly compare their work with arXiv reports that appeared shortly before the submission deadline imposes an unreasonable burden. We also do not wish to discourage the publication of similar ideas that have been developed independently and concurrently. Authors and reviewers should keep the following guidelines in mind:

  • Authors are not required to discuss and compare their work with recent arXiv reports, although they must properly cite those that inspired them.

  • To reduce confusion, whenever citing papers that initially appeared on arXiv, the authors should check whether those papers had subsequently been published in a peer-reviewed venue, and to cite those versions accordingly.

  • Failing to cite an arXiv paper or failing to beat its performance SHOULD NOT be sole grounds for rejection.

  • Reviewers SHOULD NOT reject a paper solely because another paper with a similar idea has already appeared on arXiv. If the reviewer suspects plagiarism or academic dishonesty, they are encouraged to bring these concerns to the attention of Area and Program Chairs.

  • It is acceptable for a reviewer to suggest that an author should acknowledge or be aware of something on arXiv.

About the Review Process

Q. Is the CVPR 2020 Review Process CONFIDENTIAL?
A. YES, CVPR 2020 Reviewing is considered confidential. All reviewers are required to keep every manuscript they review as confidential documents and not to share or distribute materials for any reason except to facilitate the reviewing of the submitted work.

Q. Are CVPR 2020 Reviews Double BLIND or Single BLIND?
A. CVPR reviewing is Double BLIND, in that authors do not know the names of the area chair/reviewers of their papers, and area chairs/reviewers do not know the names of the authors. Please read Section 1.6 of the example paper egpaper_for_review.pdf for detailed instructions on how to preserve anonymity. Avoid providing information that may identify the authors in the acknowledgments (e.g., co-workers and grant IDs) and in the supplemental material (e.g., titles in the movies, or attached papers). Avoid providing links to websites that identify the authors. Violation of any of these guidelines will lead to rejection without review.

About Code Submission

Q. Is code submission required?
A. No, it is completely optional.

Q. Does submitted code need to be anonymized?
A. CVPR is a double blind conference, so authors should make a reasonable effort to anonymize the submitted code and data. This means that author names, institution names and licenses should be removed. If the paper gets accepted, we expect the authors to replace the submitted code by a non-anonymized version or link to a public github repository.

Q. Are anonymous github links allowed?
A. Yes. However, they have to be on a branch that will not be modified after the submission deadline. Please enter the github link in a standalone text file in a submitted zip file.

Q. How will the submitted code be used for decision-making?
A. The submitted code will be used as additional evidence provided by the authors to add more credibility to their results. We anticipate that high quality papers whose results are judged by our reviewers to be credible will be accepted to CVPR, even if code is not submitted. However, if something is unclear in the paper, then code, if submitted, will provide an extra chance for reviewers to verify it.

Q. If code is submitted, do you expect it to be published with the rest of the supplementary? Or, could it be withdrawn later?
A. We expect submitted code to be published with the rest of the supplementary. However, if the paper gets accepted, then the authors will get a chance to update the code before it is published by adding author names, licenses, etc.

Q. Do you expect the code to be standalone? For example, what if it is part of a much bigger codebase?
A. We expect your code to be readable and helpful to reviewers in verifying the credibility of your results. It is possible to do this through code that is not standalone -- for example, with proper documentation.

Q. What about pseudocode instead of code? Does that count as code submission?
A. Yes, we will count detailed pseudocode as code submission as it is helpful to reviewers in validating the credibility of your results.

Q. Do you expect authors to submit data?
A. We understand that many of our authors work with highly sensitive datasets, and are not asking for private data submission. If the dataset used is publicly available, there is no need to provide it. If the dataset is private, then the authors can submit a toy or simulated dataset to illustrate how the code works.

Q. Who has access to my code? For how long?
A. Only the reviewers and Area Chair assigned to your paper will have access to your code. We will instruct reviewers and Area Chair to keep the code submissions confidential (just like the paper submissions), and delete all code submissions from their machine at the end of the review cycle. Please note that code submission is also completely voluntary.

Q. I would like to revise my code/add code during author feedback. Is this permitted?
A. Unfortunately, no. But please remember that code submission is entirely optional.