--- name: colm-workflow description: Use when planning a COLM submission campaign across the calendar — working backward from the late-March abstract and paper deadlines through the May-June rebuttal, July decisions, August camera-ready, and October conference, coordinating co-authors, compute, and reciprocal-reviewing duties, and slotting COLM into a multi-venue LM-research pipeline. --- # COLM Workflow COLM gives you exactly one shot per year: one deadline (late March in 2026), one rebuttal, one decision (early July), one October stage. Campaign planning is therefore mostly *backward induction from March* — and, because LM projects burn compute and involve many hands, the critical path is usually GPUs and co-author availability, not writing. ## The 2026 cycle as a template (all dates verified 2026-07-08) | Date (2026) | Event | What must already be true | |---|---|---| | February | OpenReview opens | Profiles current for every author | | March 26 | Abstract deadline | Real abstract; reciprocal reviewer chosen | | March 31 | Full paper deadline | Frozen claims, pinned evidence, anonymized package | | May 22 | Reviews released | Response owners pre-assigned; cache warm | | May 22 - June 8 | Rebuttal | ~18 days; plan in `colm-author-response` | | July 8 | Decisions | Both branches pre-planned | | August 7 | Camera-ready | Public artifacts ready to ship simultaneously | | October 6-9 | Conference, San Francisco | Presenter, visa, poster all handled | **Live-phase note:** on this pack's access date — 2026-07-08 — the 2026 cycle is at decision day. If that is you, jump to `colm-camera-ready` or the reject branch in `colm-review-process`. If you are planning fresh work, you are planning **COLM 2027**: dates unannounced (待核实), with late March the reasonable working assumption to be corrected the moment `colmweb.org` posts the real calendar. ## Backward plan from a March deadline ```text T-20w (Nov) route the project (colm-topic-selection); if COLM, freeze the one-sentence finding and the evaluation design — contamination handling decided NOW, not retrofitted (colm-experiments) T-16w (Dec) compute budget locked: training runs, eval sweeps, API spend; book cluster time — March demand is when everyone else trains too T-12w (Jan) main experiments running; pinning discipline live from day one (colm-reproducibility); related-work lanes assigned (colm-related-work) T-8w (Feb) full draft v1; internal red-team review against the four attacks; OpenReview profiles + reciprocal-reviewer map done when the venue opens T-4w (Mar) freeze claims; kill or hedge anything unverified; build the anonymized package (colm-supplementary) T-1w abstract in (Mar 26); mechanical sweeps; co-author policy items T-0 (Mar 31) upload; re-download; read cold ``` Two LM-specific scheduling truths: **evaluation takes as long as training** once you include prompt-sensitivity runs, multiple families, and CI-grade sampling — budget it explicitly; and **the February cluster crunch is real** — every LM group targets the same spring deadlines, so compute reserved in December is worth double compute begged for in March. ## Coordination artifacts for a multi-author LM paper - **A claims ledger** — every claim, its owner, its evidence status (verified / running / at-risk). The T-4w freeze operates on this ledger. - **A reciprocal-reviewing map** — who is nominated for which submission across the *whole group's* March portfolio; the same person cannot cover two papers, and anyone on 4+ submissions is drafted into the pool regardless. - **A policy checklist per co-author** — OpenReview profile, Code of Ethics acknowledgment, LLM-usage disclosure input. These are the tasks only their owners can do, which is what makes them deadline risks. - **A decision-tree memo** written before July: if accept → who runs camera-ready and the artifact release in the August-vacation month; if reject → target venue (autumn ICLR? next NeurIPS? COLM 2027?) and which review criticisms gate the resubmission. ## Slotting COLM into the venue year COLM's March deadline sits after the ICLR decision (winter) and before the NeurIPS deadline (spring), which creates the standard LM-group rotation: ICLR reject → strengthen → COLM; COLM reject (July) → strengthen → ICLR (autumn). Use the rotation deliberately, with `colm-topic-selection` as the gate each time — a paper bouncing between venues unchanged is not a strategy, it is a queue. ## The small-lab variant The plan above assumes a group; a two-person or advisor-student team runs the same calendar with different bottlenecks: | Constraint | Adaptation | |---|---| | No compute reserve | Anchor claims on open-weight models small enough to rerun; design the paper so API spend is evaluation-only and capped | | One person does everything | The T-4w claim freeze becomes T-6w; the last month is writing and packaging only | | No internal red team | Trade cold reads with a neighboring group in February — the four-attacks review (`colm-experiments`) does not require seniority, only distance | | Advisor bandwidth | Book the advisor's full-draft read for a named week in February; "when it's ready" means March 29 | | Single submission | Reciprocal-reviewing is simpler (one nominee) but the 4+ auto-draft rule may still catch a prolific advisor — check | The compensating advantage: small teams pivot. If January experiments kill the framing, a two-person team can re-route to a workshop or the autumn cycle without a committee meeting — take that exit deliberately rather than limping to March. ## Failure patterns this calendar produces - Evaluation designed after training finishes → contamination handling becomes an apology instead of a design (start it at T-20w). - Abstract stub on March 26 → bad reviewer matching that no rebuttal can fix. - Rebuttal window discovered at review-release → the 18 days start with three days of panic; pre-assign owners in March. - August camera-ready month colliding with vacations → name the owner in July. ## Workshop track as a parallel lane COLM's workshop day (October 9 in 2026) runs its own later calendar — in 2026, workshop proposals were due April 14, and contributed workshop papers had a suggested June 23 deadline with mandatory notification by July 24. For work that misses March or is not archival-ready, the workshop lane keeps the project inside the COLM community's October gathering without burning the main-track shot — and a workshop audience in October is the best red team a March 2027 main-track version will ever get. Check each workshop's own pages; their deadlines and archival status vary (待核实 per workshop). ## Output format ```text [Target cycle] COLM 202X — deadline [Phase now] [Critical path] [Ledger health] claims verified /; at-risk: [Group constraints] reciprocal map ▢ 4+-submission authors: [Next milestone] ```