Use this when distributing material across the three containers a KDD submission actually has: the 8 content pages, the optional appendix after the references, and the repository cited in the PDF. KDD has no separate supplement upload deadline in the 2026 pattern — the appendix travels inside the submission PDF — which makes the split decision a writing-time decision, not a deadline-week one.
| Container | Size discipline | Reviewer obligation | Survives to proceedings? |
|---|---|---|---|
| 8 content pages | Hard budget | Must be reviewable standalone | Yes, grows to 9 |
| Appendix (after refs) | Unbounded at submission (verify current CFP) | Discretionary reading | Only within the 3-page refs+appendix cap |
| Cited repository | Practically unbounded | Rarely opened; never linkable again after submission | Yes, as the public artifact |
The asymmetry between submission and camera-ready is the planning trap: an appendix that balloons to 15 pages at submission must shrink to fit references + appendix within 3 pages of the 12-page proceedings version. Anything you are not prepared to delete or migrate to the repository later should not be load-bearing in review.
Content pages — everything a reviewer needs to score the paper: the mechanism, the main comparison table, the mechanism-isolating ablation, complexity statements, the deployment metrics (ADS). The KDD failure pattern is a body that reads like an extended abstract with "see Appendix" doing the arguing; reviewers score what they can see in eight pages.
Appendix — proofs of stated propositions, full hyperparameter grids, per-dataset result breakdowns, extra case studies, prompt/feature inventories, dataset documentation. Order it by reference-frequency from the body, restate each claim before its proof, and reference every appendix table from the body at least once — orphaned appendix material is invisible under reviewer discretion.
Repository — anything executable, anything larger than a page of tables, extended
logs, and full configs. Remember the one-way door: the repo must be cited in the PDF
at submission because rebuttals cannot introduce links (see kdd-artifact-evaluation).
A paper returning after a Resubmit decision prepends a one-page summary of changes as the first page of the PDF, alongside the previous OpenReview forum id in the form. Treat that page as the highest-value real estate in the resubmission:
Summary of Changes (Resubmission of forum <id>)
R1-W1 "no ablation isolating the decay mechanism"
-> New Table 5 (Sec 5.3): decay ablation across all datasets.
R2-W1 "temporal leakage suspected in splits"
-> Splits rebuilt time-ordered (Sec 4.2); all tables regenerated;
headline delta changed from +4.1 to +3.3, conclusions unchanged.
R3-W2 "claims exceed tested scale"
-> Claim scoped to <=2.1B events (Abstract, Sec 1); added 2.1B-event run.
Unaddressed: R2-W3 (user study) - out of scope, argued in Sec 6.
Point-by-point, mapped to sections, honest about what changed numerically and what was declined — this is the page the new area chair reads first.
migrate-to-body, compress,
move-to-repo, or cut — the 3-page cap arrives with acceptance.A submission proposes a partitioning scheme for distributed GNN training with a cost-model analysis, twelve datasets, and a parameter study. The split that survives both review and the eventual 3-page cap:
Nothing in the appendix is load-bearing for the score; everything in it answers a question a reviewer might ask. That is the target state.
[Container split] body: <sections> / appendix: <sections> / repo: <items>
[Standalone test] body scoreable without appendix: yes / no -> <promotions needed>
[Orphan check] appendix sections w/o body references: <list or none>
[Camera-ready fates] <section -> migrate/compress/move-to-repo/cut>
[Resubmission page] present + point-by-point / N-A
[Anonymity] appendix + repo sweep: clean / findings