Use this to build evidence a WACV reviewer accepts in Round 1 instead of sending to Revise and Resubmit. The controlling idea: WACV reviews under two tracks, and each track has a different evidence bar. Facts are the WACV 2026/2027 cycles as read on 2026-07-09.
| Question the reviewer asks | Applications track | Algorithms track |
|---|---|---|
| Does it work where it must? | Metric under the deployment constraint (power/latency/light/data budget) | Metric on the standard benchmark |
| Is the comparison fair? | Baselines re-tuned to the same constraint, not their defaults | Baselines under matched backbone/compute |
| What does it cost? | Measured latency, wattage, memory on the named device | FLOPs/params/throughput reported honestly |
| When does it fail? | Failure cases under the real condition | Ablation isolating the mechanism |
| Is the gain real? | Uncertainty over sessions and seeds | Uncertainty over seeds; significance where small |
The single most common WACV revision request is "you compared against baselines at their defaults, not under your constraint." Pre-empt it: an Applications claim is only supported if the baselines were given the same power/data/latency budget you operated under.
Design the experiment section to answer, in order: does it work, why, when does it fail, and what does it cost. For an applications paper the "what does it cost" row is load-bearing — a system that hits accuracy but blows the power budget has not made the contribution it claims.
For each baseline B and each headline claim C under constraint K:
1. Re-tune / re-run B under K (same budget, same data regime) — not B's paper defaults.
2. Report your method and B on the same axis (e.g., boundary-F1 @ K watts).
3. Include an unconstrained upper-bound reference so the reader sees the cost of K.
4. Report each number with a spread (std over seeds and, for field/systems work, sessions).
If any baseline was run only at its default and not under K, the comparison is not yet fair.
An ablation should remove exactly the component your contribution rests on and show the metric move under the same condition. For an Algorithms-track paper this is the core of novelty; for an Applications-track paper, ablate the part that makes the system meet the constraint (the low-power front end, the data-efficient step), not a generic layer.
[Track] Applications / Algorithms
[Works] headline metric under the required condition: <value ± spread>
[Fair] baselines run under the same constraint: yes/no
[Cost] latency/power/FLOPs on named device: <reported?>
[Fails] failure analysis under the real condition: <present?>
[Uncertainty] spread over seeds/sessions: yes/no
[R&R risk] <the comparison a reviewer would call unfair>