Skills Soft Skills Structuring Content For PPoPP Papers

Structuring Content For PPoPP Papers

v20260724
ppopp-supplementary
This guide helps researchers structure their academic papers for the PPoPP conference. It outlines the principle of 'decision-criticality,' advising authors to keep core correctness arguments, headline scaling curves, and design insights in the main body, while moving bulk data, full proofs, and extensive sweeps to the artifact or appendix.
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Overview

PPoPP Supplementary

Decide what lives in the 10 reviewed pages (text and figures, two-column acmart) and what moves to the artifact or an appendix. The governing rule at PPoPP is decision-criticality: anything a reviewer must read to be convinced the result is correct under concurrency and scales stays in the body. References are unlimited and free; body space is the scarce resource.

The decision-criticality test

For each candidate piece of content, ask: would a reviewer's accept/reject change if they could not see this?

[Decides acceptance]  the correctness argument's core, the headline scaling curve, the baseline
                      comparison, the key design insight  -> BODY (inside 10 pages)
[Supports/confirms]   full linearizability proof details, every core-count data point, additional
                      workloads, sensitivity sweeps, extra GPUs  -> ARTIFACT / APPENDIX
[Bulk / mechanical]   raw logs, per-run tables, generator internals, build scripts  -> ARTIFACT

The failure mode PPoPP punishes is burying a load-bearing argument — the linearization points, the one plot that shows saturation — outside the reviewed pages, so the reviewer cannot judge the claim and defaults to skepticism.

What must stay in the body

  • The correctness argument's spine. The property (linearizability/progress), the linearization points or the key invariant, and why it holds under the named memory model. The full formal proof can move; the argument a reviewer needs to believe it cannot.
  • The headline scaling evidence. At least one clear speedup/throughput curve over core or thread count, with the baseline and machine named in the caption.
  • The baseline comparison that substantiates the delta over prior work.
  • The design insight that makes the parallelism work — the idea, not every implementation detail.

What can move out

  • Full proofs and case analyses — keep the argument in the body, push the exhaustive case split to an appendix or the artifact.
  • Complete sweeps — the body shows the representative curve; the artifact holds every thread count, socket configuration, input size, and GPU.
  • Additional workloads and sensitivity studies that confirm rather than establish the claim.
  • Reproduction machinery — Dockerfiles, scripts, raw data, and per-run numbers belong in the artifact (see ppopp-artifact-evaluation).

Where "out" is at PPoPP

  • The artifact is the primary home for bulk evidence and is evaluated post-acceptance — reviewers of the paper are not obligated to run it, so it cannot carry a decision-critical claim at review time.
  • An appendix, if the call permits one within submission rules, is read at the reviewer's discretion — do not put anything acceptance-deciding there and assume it was read. Confirm the current appendix policy each cycle (待核实 if unstated).

Because the artifact is post-acceptance, the split at PPoPP is stricter than at venues that review the artifact alongside the paper: if the reviewer must see it to say yes, it is in the 10 pages.

Keeping the body legible under the page cap

  • Use small multiples to compress a core sweep into one figure rather than five.
  • Move exhaustive tables to the artifact and keep a summarizing plot in the body.
  • Cut prose before cutting evidence; the correctness argument and the scaling curve are the last things to shrink.

Output format

[Body (<=10pp)] correctness spine + headline curve + baseline + design insight all present?
[Moved out] proofs-detail / full sweeps / extra workloads / repro machinery -> artifact/appendix
[Decision-critical check] anything acceptance-deciding placed outside the body? (must be none)
[Appendix policy] permitted this cycle? confirmed / 待核实
[Space recovered] figures merged / tables moved to hit 10 pages
Info
Category Soft Skills
Name ppopp-supplementary
Version v20260724
Size 4.17KB
Updated At 2026-07-29
Language