Skills Development Structuring Supplementary Material for CAV Papers

Structuring Supplementary Material for CAV Papers

v20260724
cav-supplementary
Provides strict guidelines for assembling supplementary material for Computer Aided Verification (CAV) papers. It details how to separate decision-critical content (main theorems, proof ideas) into the primary body, while moving voluminous details (full proofs, massive benchmarks) to the optional appendix or artifact, ensuring the paper remains judgeable from the main text alone.
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Overview

CAV Supplementary

Use this when assembling CAV supplementary material. The governing rule is strict and specific to CAV's format: a clearly marked appendix is allowed, but reviewers are not obliged to read it. So the paper must be judgeable from the body alone — anything a reviewer must see to accept lives inside the page limit, and the appendix and artifact only support it.

What goes where

Content Body (within the page limit) Appendix / artifact
The problem, the technique, the main theorem Yes
Proof idea / sketch of the main result Yes Full formal proof
Supporting lemmas Statement + role Full proofs
Headline benchmark comparison + resource limits Yes Full per-instance tables
Soundness/differential-check result The result + method The raw logs and witnesses
Benchmark set + selection Summary + revision The full instance list, fetch scripts
Tool build/run instructions A pointer README + scripts (artifact)
Proof certificates / witnesses A pointer The certificates + a checker (artifact)

If a reviewer would need to open the appendix or artifact to know whether the theorem holds or the comparison is fair, the paper is mis-partitioned — move that content into the body.

The page-limit discipline

CAV's LNCS limits (Regular 18 pages; Short Tool / Application / Industrial 10 pages) exclude references and appendices, but the appendix is optional-to-read. Consequences:

  • Keep the main theorem's proof idea and the headline benchmark result with its resource limits in the body — they are decision-critical.
  • Move full formal proofs, per-instance benchmark tables, and extra property classes to the appendix or artifact with explicit forward references.
  • Do not use the appendix to smuggle in a result that would not fit — an argument that only closes with unread material reads as unreviewable, and the stage-1 filter is unforgiving.

Double-anonymous supplementary rules (Regular and Application papers)

[No identity]   no authors, affiliations, acknowledgements, grants, cluster paths, or repo owners in
                the appendix or the review-time artifact; anonymize the tool/solver name
[Anonymized links] the artifact link points at an anonymizing host, not a personal repo or tool site
[Clean archive]  no .git history, .DS_Store, credentials, caches, or large irrelevant files
[Opens clean]    verify the archive unpacks and the README orients a reviewer in minutes on a fresh
                machine (the AEC smoke test mirrors this)

Tool and Industrial papers are not anonymized, so their supplementary material may name the tool — but should still be clean and self-orienting.

Appendix architecture

  • Order appendix sections to mirror the paper: main-theorem proof first, then lemma proofs, then full benchmark tables, then extra experiments — reviewers navigate by the claim, not by page number.
  • Keep each appendix section referenced from the body at least once; orphaned material is invisible under discretionary reading.
  • Confirm on the current CFP that appendices are inside the same PDF (not a separate upload) and that they do not count against the limit — this is the CAV norm but re-verify.

Vignette: splitting a technique-plus-tool paper

A Regular Paper with one main soundness theorem, three lemmas, and a large benchmark study: the body keeps the problem, the technique, the main theorem with its proof idea, the lemma statements, and the headline cactus/scatter comparison with the resource limits and the soundness cross-check; the appendix holds the full proofs; the artifact holds the pinned benchmark set, the per-instance logs, the seeds, the proof witnesses with a checker, and the reproduction scripts. Nothing decision-critical lives only in unread material, because the stage-1 reviewers judge from the body.

Output format

[Supplement status] ready / needs fixes / not ready
[Partition check] anything decision-critical outside the body? <none / move: what>
[Page limit] body within the category limit? appendix marked and referenced? yes/no
[Anonymity] appendix + review artifact clean of identity (Regular/Application)? passed/issues
[Body dependency] <what a reviewer can decide without opening the appendix/artifact>
Info
Category Development
Name cav-supplementary
Version v20260724
Size 4.7KB
Updated At 2026-07-28
Language