ISCA Author Response

ISCA 2026 gave authors a combined rebuttal/revision period, February 16 to March 6 — three weeks in which the team could both argue and change the paper. That design rewards teams that treat the window as an engineering sprint with a triage phase, and punishes teams that spend it composing indignation. Everything here assumes that verified 2026 structure; the 2027 window's existence, length, and rules are 待核实 until the new CFP posts.

Day 1-2: triage before any writing or computing

Read all reviews twice: once fast for temperature, once slow building the objection ledger. Classify every distinct point:

Then rank by leverage: an F held by two reviewers outranks an E held by one; anything a likely champion needs to defend the paper outranks everything else (isca-review-process explains why the champion is the audience).

Day 2: freeze the experiment plan

Pick at most three new experiments — the ones that convert the highest-leverage E-class objections into numbers. Assign owners and a hard finish date one week before window close, leaving prose time. The classic window failure is five half-finished experiments and a response that promises rather than shows.

window-plan.md
  R2.O3  (E, leverage=high)  "no comparison vs LazyMerge at equal storage"
         -> run: lazymerge @ 18KB/core, full suite; owner: MK; due Feb 27
  R1.O1  (F, leverage=high)  "warm-up unstated"
         -> answer: §5.1 para 2, 50M inst; also add to config table in revision
  R3.O2  (D, leverage=med)   "decay threshold fragile"
         -> run: sweep T in {2K..64K}; expect plateau; owner: JL; due Feb 25
  R3.O5  (T, leverage=low)   "why not epoch-based?"
         -> one paragraph, cite §4.2 rationale; no experiment

Writing the response document

Structure for committee reading, not reviewer combat:

1. Opening block (5-6 lines): thank, then list the concrete changes/results produced during the window — the things a champion can repeat in the room.
2. Per-objection sections keyed to review IDs, highest-leverage first. Each: restate the objection in one neutral line, answer with evidence (number, table row, or PDF pointer), stop.
3. Shared-objection consolidation: answer once, cross-reference the copies — it shows the committee the objection set is smaller than it looks.

Tone rules that survive contact with real committees: concede real limitations in plain declarative sentences (concessions buy credibility that transfers to your rebuttals); never speculate about reviewer expertise or identity; never claim "all reviewers agree" about anything they don't.

Using the revision half of the window

If the cycle permits an updated PDF (2026's window was named rebuttal/revision):

• Make surgical edits keyed to objections: the missing baseline column, the config-table row, the limitation paragraph, the clarified walk-through.
• Do not restructure the paper — reviewers re-reading diff mentally against their memory, and a rewritten paper resets their evaluation instead of repairing it.
• Maintain a change log mapping edit → objection; if the process provides no place to submit it, embed the mapping in the response document.
• Keep the paper inside all format rules; a revision that breaks the 11-page budget converts goodwill into a violation. This is what the half-page of slack from isca-writing-style was for.

What not to spend the window on

• New contributions. Results beyond the paper's claimed scope read as a different paper and invite "needs another round of review" — the phrase that kills borderline papers.
• Rebutting every sentence. A 15-point response to a 3-objection review buries your leverage. Committees skim; make the skim land the top three.
• Premise litigation at length. One paragraph of motivation defense with data; more looks defensive and reads worse each repetition.
• Simulator relitigating. If a reviewer distrusts your instrument globally, the fix is the validation anchor you either have (point to it) or don't (concede and scope) — not an essay on simulation philosophy.

Window-close checklist

• Every review ID answered or explicitly consolidated
• Top-3 objections answered with numbers produced this window
• All F-class errors corrected with pointers, tone neutral
• Revision (if permitted) diff-minimal, format-legal, change-mapped
• A colleague outside the project read the response cold and could state your three key answers back to you
• Submitted with margin — the window closes AoE like everything else

The three weeks on a calendar

Using the 2026 window (Feb 16 - Mar 6) as the shape:

After the window, silence until decisions; outcome handling branches in isca-review-process, and calendar context lives in isca-workflow. Verified dates: ../../resources/official-source-map.md (2026-07-08).