Reviewer Guidelines

Thank you for serving on the program committee of 3DV 2020 as a reviewer. Publications in conferences have a critical impact on scientific careers in our fields. Reviews on which acceptance or reject decisions are made are therefore of critical importance and should be written carefully. We ask that you take your duty seriously and have your reviews ready on time.

Reviewer Timeline

Paper Assignments	August 7, 2020
Review Completion	September 8, 2020
Author Rebuttal Deadline	September 21, 2020
Reviewer Final Decision	September 25, 2020

Check your papers for conflicts

As soon as you get your reviewing assignment, please download your papers and go through them to make sure that there is no obvious conflict with you (e.g., a paper authored by your recent collaborator from a different institution). If you feel you are in conflict with a paper, please let us know right away by emailing the Program Chairs:3DV20PCs@3dv.org

What to Look For

Look for what’s good or stimulating in the paper. Minor flaws can be corrected and shouldn’t be a reason to reject a paper. We recommend that you embrace novel, brave concepts, even if they have not been tested on many datasets. For example, the fact that a proposed method does not exceed the state-of-the-art accuracy on an existing benchmark dataset is not grounds for rejection by itself. Acceptance and rejection decisions should not be determined solely by the method’s raw performance. Rather, it is important to weigh both the novelty and potential impact of the work alongside the reported performance. Each paper that is accepted should be technically sound and make a contribution to the field.

Blind Reviews

Authors were asked to take reasonable efforts to hide their identities, including not listing their names or affiliations and omitting acknowledgments. This information will of course be included in the published version. Please see the Author Guidelines for details on how authors have been instructed to preserve anonymity, including guidelines for referencing one’s own prior work. Reviewers should also make all efforts to keep their identity invisible to the authors. For example, don’t give away your identity by asking the authors to cite several of your own papers.

An important general guideline is to make every effort to treat papers fairly whether or not they know (or suspect) who wrote them. Reviewers should not search for the authors of a paper, and complain that the paper is not anonymous if they happen to find them.

In line with common practice in the community, arXiv papers are not considered prior work since they have not been peer reviewed. Therefore, you should review your 3DV papers independently as if the arXiv papers didn’t exist. Citations to these papers are not required and failing to cite or beat performance of arXiv papers are not grounds for rejection.

Check for Reproducibility

To improve reproducibility in AI research, we highly encourage authors to voluntarily submit their code as part of supplementary material, especially if they plan to release it upon acceptance. Reviewers may optionally check this code to ensure the paper’s results are reproducible and trustworthy, but are not required to. Reviewers are also encouraged to use the Reproducibility Checklist as a guide for assessing whether a paper is reproducible or not. All code/data should be reviewed confidentially and kept private, and deleted after the review process is complete. We expect (but do not require) that the accompanying code will be submitted with accepted papers.

Be Specific

Please be specific and detailed in your reviews. In the discussion of related work and references, simply saying “this is well known” or “this has been common practice in the industry for years” is not sufficient: cite specific publications, including books, or public disclosures of techniques. Similarly, claims in a review that the submitted work “has been done before” must be backed up with specific references and an explanation of how closely they are related. At the same time, for a positive review, be sure to summarize what novel aspects are most interesting in the strengths. Be specific when you suggest that the writing needs to be improved. If there is a particular section that is unclear, point it out and give suggestions for how it can be clarified. If you think the paper is out of scope for 3DV’s subject areas, clearly explain why in the review. You may find the Call for Papers here ( CFP link ). Then suggest other publication possibilities (journals, conferences, workshops) that would be a better match for the paper.

Be Professional

Belittling or sarcastic comments have no place in the reviewing process. The most valuable comments in a review are those that help the authors understand the shortcomings of their work and how they might improve it. Write a courteous, informative, incisive, and helpful review that you would be proud to add your name to (were it not anonymous). Avoid referring to the authors by using the phrase “you”. These phrases should be replaced by “the authors” or “the paper”. Referring to the authors as “you” can be perceived as being confrontational, even though you do not mean it this way.

Writing Technical Reviews

We volunteer our time by reviewing papers that are written by other researchers in our field. We recommend that you approach your reviews in this spirit of volunteerism. Your reviews make you a gatekeeper in helping decide which papers are ready for publication. Just as important, however, is to provide feedback to the authors so that they may improve their work. Try to write your review in a way that the authors can benefit from. We suggest reading a paper and then thinking about it over the course of several days before you write your review. Please keep in mind that short reviews are unhelpful to authors, other reviewers, and Area Chairs. If you have agreed to review a paper, you should take enough time to write a thoughtful and detailed review.

The tone of your review is also important. A harshly written review will be disregarded by the authors, regardless of whether your criticisms are true. If you take care, it is always possible to word your review diplomatically while staying true to your thoughts about the paper. Put yourself in the mindset of writing to someone you wish to help, such as a respected colleague who wants your opinion on a concept or a project.

Your main critique of the paper should be written in terms of a list of strengths and weaknesses of the paper. Use bullet points here, and explain your arguments. Your discussion, sometimes more than your score, will help the authors, fellow reviewers, and Area Chairs understand the basis of your opinions, so please be thorough. Your reviews will be returned to the authors, so you should include specific feedback on ways the authors can improve their papers.

Handling papers not in your specific area

3DV is a small conference, but involves the very broad topic of 3D Vision that spans both computer vision and computer graphics. Paper assignments are done by Area Chairs who rely on their knowledge of your work as well as the match of submitted paper and your subject areas. It is very likely you will be assigned a paper that may be slightly out of your specific research area. In such cases, we ask that you do the best you can to review the paper. We trust your ability to distinguish between good papers and those that are not yet ready for acceptance.

When You’re Done

Submissions should be treated as confidential. When you have finished with your review, you should destroy any paper manuscript and/or supporting material you received.

CMT Instructions

Once you've been notified by email that papers have been assigned to you, please log into the CMT site ( https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/3DV2020 ), choose the “Reviewer” role on top, and follow the steps below.

1. Download your papers

To download individual papers, you can click the links underneath individual paper titles. Or, you can click the “Actions” button in the top right corner and then choose “Download Files”. This allows you to download a zip file containing all the papers plus supplementary files (if available).

2. Review papers and assign them a preliminary (pre-rebuttal) rating

For a paper, under the review column, click "Edit Review" to get to the review form. Before you start writing your reviews, make sure you have read the Reviewer Guidelines above.

3. Participate in discussions with Area Chairs and other reviewers

After the rebuttal period, reviewers will work with Area Chairs to clear up any confusions and attempt to reach consensus on papers. The CMT site has an electronic bulletin board feature that allows Area Chairs to contact reviewers anonymously. Once the Area Chair posts a note, reviewers will be notified and asked to log in to see the post and respond. The identities of the reviewers will be hidden from each other (but not from the Area Chair).

4. Enter your final (post-rebuttal) rating

After the rebuttal period you will enter your final rating on CMT. This may differ from your preliminary rating, and should reflect your judgment taking into account all the other reviews, the authors' rebuttal, and the discussion about the paper (if any).