--- name: corl-workflow description: Use when planning a CoRL submission cycle end to end — the late-May abstract and paper deadlines, the summer review window, first-round rejection risk, the August one-page rebuttal and discussion period, autumn decisions, the October PMLR camera-ready, and the November conference — including what to do between milestones. --- # CoRL Workflow CoRL runs one cycle per year on a spring-submit / autumn-decide / November-meet rhythm. This skill turns the 2026 calendar (verified 2026-07-08 via corl.org, OpenReview, and the conference's public timeline) into a working plan, including what a team should be doing *right now* in each phase. ## The 2026 cycle as a reference timeline | Milestone | CoRL 2026 date | Status on 2026-07-08 | |---|---|---| | Abstract registration | May 26, 2026 | passed | | Paper + supplementary deadline | May 29, 2026 | passed | | Review period (reviewers, ACs, SACs) | June – early August 2026 | **in progress** | | Reviews released / first-round rejections | early August 2026 [exact date 待核实] | upcoming | | One-page PDF rebuttal due | August 11, 2026, 11:59 PM AoE | upcoming | | Reviewer–AC discussion window | August 12–19, 2026 | upcoming | | Decision notification | September 2026 [exact date 待核实] | upcoming | | Camera-ready to PMLR pipeline | October 12, 2026, 23:59 AoE | upcoming | | Conference (JW Marriott, Austin, TX) | November 9–12, 2026 (workshops Nov 9) | upcoming | Every date above is a single cycle's snapshot. The 2027 cycle will publish its own timeline at the corl.org year-site; nothing here transfers automatically. ## Phase playbooks ### Now: the submitted-paper quiet period (June–July) - **Do not update the OpenReview PDF** — the submission is frozen; focus energy on experiments you may need for the rebuttal instead. - Pre-build rebuttal ammunition: the most predictable reviewer asks at CoRL are more seeds, more evaluation episodes, a missing robot-learning baseline, and a real-robot check for a sim-heavy paper. Run these *before* reviews land; the window between reviews and the August 11 rebuttal deadline is days, not weeks. - Keep the anonymized project site (if any) untouched and unlinked from any identity; review is double-anonymous until decisions. - Decide the fallback venue now (see `corl-topic-selection`), so a first-round rejection in early August converts to a resubmission plan the same week. ### Reviews land (early August) - Triage against the first-round rejection rule first: in the 2026 process, a paper with no score of weak-accept-or-above from any reviewer or the AC is a candidate for rejection **without rebuttal**. If you are past that gate, the rebuttal is live — switch to `corl-author-response` immediately. - Map each concern to: (a) already answered in the paper, (b) answerable with a prepared experiment, (c) requires concession. One page forces this triage anyway. ### Rebuttal through decision (mid-August – September) - Submit the one-page PDF by August 11, 11:59 PM AoE; then remain reachable — the reviewer–AC discussion (Aug 12–19) can surface follow-ups, and reviewers are asked to update scores when a rebuttal warrants it. - Decisions are finalized in SAC–AC meetings and a final SACs–PCs meeting; there is no author-visible activity in that stage, so use September for the camera-ready or resubmission branch prep. ### Acceptance branch (September – November) - Camera-ready: 9-page main text (one page more than submission, explicitly to absorb review feedback), `\usepackage[final]{corl_2026}`, appendix merged into the same PDF, due October 12, 23:59 AoE — see `corl-camera-ready`. - Remember that reviews and rebuttals of accepted papers are made public: write the camera-ready knowing the exchange will be readable next to it. - Book Austin early; plan the poster/talk material and the public code release (`corl-artifact-evaluation`) in parallel, not sequentially. ## Team calendar template ```yaml # corl-cycle-plan.yaml — assign an owner and a date to every row paper_id: "" phase_now: post-submission # update as the cycle advances rebuttal_prep: extra_seeds_run: {owner: , status: } # started before reviews arrive missing_baseline: {owner: , status: } real_robot_spotcheck: {owner: , status: } one_page_template_ready: {owner: , status: } # LaTeX skeleton compiled dates_to_watch: reviews_released: "early Aug 2026 (待核实 — watch OpenReview + corl.org)" rebuttal_due: "2026-08-11 23:59 AoE" discussion: "2026-08-12..19" decision: "Sep 2026 (待核实)" camera_ready: "2026-10-12 23:59 AoE" fallback: venue: "" # decided BEFORE decisions arrive required_rework: "" ``` ## Planning a CoRL 2027 submission from scratch Working backward from a late-May deadline (the 2026 pattern; 2027 dates 待核实): 1. **T minus 9–12 months** — lock the task suite and data-collection plan; hardware time and teleop data are the long poles in robot-learning projects. 2. **T minus 6 months** — baselines running end to end; if a claim needs sim-to-real evidence, the real-robot rig must exist by now, not in April. 3. **T minus 3 months** — full evaluation protocol frozen (seeds, episodes, task splits — `corl-experiments`); start the paper with the Limitations section drafted early, since it is mandatory and counts inside the 8 pages. 4. **T minus 1 month** — supplementary video storyboarded and shot (`corl-supplementary`); anonymization sweep of paper, video, and any site. 5. **Deadline week** — abstract registration a few days before the paper deadline (2026 spacing: May 26 vs May 29); final OpenReview form checks per `corl-submission`. ## Risks specific to this venue's shape - The rebuttal window is short and fixed; teams that start experiments after reviews arrive routinely miss it. Prepare in the quiet period. - The single annual deadline means a miss costs a full year — hold the routing discussion (`corl-topic-selection`) before investing deadline-week effort. - Hardware fails on deadline schedules: keep one robot-day of slack per claimed real-robot table in the final month. Reconfirm every date at https://www.corl.org/ (2026 cycle) or the 2027 year-site before acting; this file records the 2026-07-08 state of knowledge.