--- name: cvpr-writing-style description: Use when writing or revising a CVPR paper's prose and figures, covering the 8-page budget where figures and tables count against the limit, the page-1 teaser figure convention, benchmark-table craft, claim calibration for a skeptical vision audience, and taking responsibility for tool-assisted text under CVPR's rules. --- # CVPR Writing Style CVPR is a visual venue with a brutal budget: eight pages **including figures and tables** (references overflow free — verified 2026 rule). The papers that survive triage by an overloaded reviewer pool are the ones a reader can evaluate in two passes: a 90-second flip through figures and tables, then a real read. Write both passes on purpose. ## The two-pass reader **Pass one is visual.** Reviewers at a 16k-submission venue flip: Figure 1, the tables, the qualitative grid, the ablation. If that flip communicates problem → idea → win, the close read starts friendly. Concretely: - **Figure 1 (the teaser)** sits on page 1 and must state the paper alone: task, what prior work gets wrong, what yours does instead — ideally on the same input. A teaser that needs the caption's third sentence has failed. - **Every caption is self-contained**: dataset, metric, and the takeaway sentence. Flip readers never see body text. - **The main table is typeset as an argument**: best numbers bold, second-best underlined, methods grouped by supervision/backbone class, your row where the eye lands last. ## Budgeting eight inclusive pages | Section | Typical share | Compression lever | |---|---|---| | Title/abstract/teaser | ~1 page | Teaser earns its half page or shrinks | | Intro | ~1 page | Contributions as 3 bullets, no history lesson | | Related work | ~0.75 page | Position, don't survey (see `cvpr-related-work`) | | Method + pipeline figure | ~2 pages | One figure replacing a page of prose | | Experiments | ~2.5–3 pages | Grids to supplement; keep the decisive ablation | | Limitations/conclusion | ~0.25–0.5 page | Honest and short | Because figures count, figure design *is* text editing: a two-column pipeline figure costing 0.6 page must delete at least 0.6 page of method prose, or it is negative space. Cut from the flip-reader's perspective — never cut the ablation table to save a paragraph of adjectives. ## Sentence-level norms of the genre - Present tense, active voice, mechanism first: "We replace the cost volume with …" beats "In recent years, cost volumes have been widely used…". - Name the delta in numbers early: "+2.1 AP on COCO with 40% fewer FLOPs" in the abstract, not "significant improvements". - One notation table, introduced once; vision papers drown in re-defined symbols. - Kill hype adjectives ("novel", "remarkable", "extensive") — at this venue they mark inexperience; the table is the adjective. ## Claim calibration Vision reviewers are professionally allergic to overclaiming, because the field's benchmark culture makes checking easy: ```text Weak claim, strong paper: "Ours improves X on datasets A and B under protocol P with backbone Q." Strong claim, dead paper: "Ours solves X" / "generalizes to real-world scenes" (shown on 2 curated clips) "state-of-the-art" (on one dataset, vs. year-old baselines) "real-time" (no hardware named — CRF row contradicts you) ``` Every superlative must name its scope: dataset, protocol, compute class. If a limitation is visible in your own qualitative grid, write it in the limitations paragraph first — reviewers reward the paper that scoops its own weaknesses. ## Tool-assisted text is your text The verified 2026 author-side rule: use whatever tools you like, but fabricated citations and factual inaccuracies are rejection grounds — possibly without review — and "an LLM did it" is explicitly no defense. Operational habit: any machine-drafted paragraph gets a human pass for (a) citations that exist and say what's claimed, (b) numbers matching your own tables, (c) generic filler that flip-readers instantly recognize as padding. ## An abstract skeleton that fits the venue Six sentences carry a CVPR abstract; more usually means the contribution is unclear: 1. **Task + failure**: the specific visual problem and where current methods break ("Trackers lose identity during occlusions longer than their temporal horizon"). 2. **Cause**: the mechanism behind the failure, in one clause — this sentence is what separates insight papers from tweak papers. 3. **Method**: what you built, named, with its one central idea. 4. **Headline evidence**: the scoped number ("+2.1 AP on COCO, matched backbone"). 5. **Breadth or cost**: second dataset, transfer result, or the efficiency figure. 6. **Availability**: what will be released (code/models/data — and remember datasets claimed as contributions carry a camera-ready release obligation). Write the abstract twice: once before the experiments as a plan, once after as a report; the diff between the two is your overclaiming audit. ## Revision protocol for a drafted paper 1. Print the figures and tables alone; run the 90-second flip test on a colleague outside the project. 2. Reconcile abstract numbers against tables (rebuttal-week embarrassment prevention). 3. Hunt "see supplement" pointers that hide decision-critical logic; pull those back. 4. Delete the roadmap paragraph ("Section 2 reviews…") — page-limited venues stopped reading them years ago. 5. Read the intro's last bullet against the conclusion: the promised contribution and the delivered one must be the same sentence. ## Reverify each cycle - Page cap and the references-only overflow rule. - Template/author-kit version (build from the current `cvpr-org/author-kit`). - Any new writing-adjacent form fields (limitations sections, AI-use disclosures — none verified for 2026, 待核实 for later cycles). ## Output format ```text [Flip test] passes / fails at:
[Budget] pages by section vs 8.0 incl. figures [Claim audit] superlatives without scope: [Caption audit] non-self-contained:
[Tool-text risk] unverified citations or numbers: [Edit order] ```