PAMI-TC Meeting Notes
CVPR 2023 PAMI-TC Meeting
Logistics and Motions
This year’s PAMI-TC meeting will be held in-person at CVPR 2023, and is planned for Wednesday, June 21st at 3:00pm in East Exhibit Halls A–B (note the break in tradition for the day and time — this is intended to increase meeting participation). Please mark this on your calendars. An attempt will be made simultaneously broadcast the meeting live on the virtual conference platform for remote attendees.
All attendees of CVPR 2023 are eligible to vote for the motions specific to the June TC meeting listed below.
Motion 1: Support for Program Chairs
Proposed by Andreas Geiger (University of Tübingen) and Svetlana Lazebnik (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
The conference sponsors will provide assistance to PC teams in securing a technical chair, up to and including financial assistance.
Background: Program chairs at CVPR currently work largely independently from PC teams of previous teams, leading to significant duplication of work and processes. Establishing the review process as well as efficiently tracking and communicating with all stakeholders (authors, reviewers, area chairs, senior area chairs) is crucial to ensure a smooth and timely review process and requires automation in the form of toolchains for interfacing with the review platform and other systems. The program and general chairs of CVPR 2023 hence propose to (permanently) hire a technical chair (50% full time equivalent) to establish and maintain the relevant toolchains for the CVPR which will persist across years and to support the program chairs on all technical matters. This will facilitate the work of the program chairs, provide the necessary continuity and lead to improvements of the CVPR review and publication process as well as the virtual conference platform.
Motion 2: Support for Area Chairs
Proposed by Andreas Geiger (University of Tübingen), Judy Hoffman (Georgia Institute of Technology), Ross Girshick (Facebook), Svetlana Lazebnik (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Vladlen Koltun (Apple)
Area Chairs (and Senior Area Chairs, if any) will receive complimentary in-person registrations for the conference for which they are serving. Free AC registration will always be included in the conference budget, though it may be adjusted or removed if a conference is in the position of taking a financial loss.
Background: Area Chairs (ACs) have always played a vital role in top-tier vision conferences such as CVPR and ICCV, and, as these conferences keep growing, this role is only becoming more important. Unfortunately, the incentives offered to ACs in recent years have not been adequate, given that in-person AC meetings are no longer regularly held, and even free registrations are not always provided. While there have been understandable budgetary concerns behind recent decisions not to provide free registrations, such concerns have never yet proved to be justified in light of strong in-person attendance trends, and are far outweighed by numerous arguments in favor of this benefit.
ACs volunteer their expertise and many hours of their time to the conference on top of their regular commitments. At the same time, attending vision conferences has become prohibitively expensive for participants with limited access to funding or support from their institutions, and especially for those from groups historically underrepresented at these conferences. As a concrete data point, in the Program Chairs’ survey of CVPR 2023 ACs, 27% indicated that they would need a registration fee waiver in order to attend the conference.
Offering free registrations to ACs is a tangible way to acknowledge their service and dedication at a very moderate cost to IEEE/CVF. It will help to alleviate the very real financial burden that many of these volunteers face, as well as improve the diversity and inclusiveness of our conferences. Ultimately, by encouraging more individuals to volunteer for the AC role, it will help to ensure the sustainability of the peer review model without which top-tier vision conferences as we know them cannot continue to exist.
Motion 3: Repeal of the CVPR Social Media Ban
Proposed by Abhinav Shrivastava (University of Maryland), Andrew Owens (University of Michigan), Angjoo Kanazawa (University of California Berkeley), Carl Vondrick (Columbia University), David Fouhey (University of Michigan), Deepak Pathak (Carnegie Mellon University),
Georgia Gkioxari (Caltech), Jia Deng (Princeton University), Jiajun Wu (Stanford University), Judy Hoffman (Georgia Institute of Technology), Justin Johnson (University of Michigan), Katie Bouman (Caltech), Manolis Savva (Simon Fraser University), Mengye Ren (New York University), Olga Russakovsky (Princeton University), Phillip Isola (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Saining Xie (New York University), Sara Beery (Massachusetts Institute of Technology),
Shubham Tulsiani (Carnegie Mellon University), Shuran Song (Columbia University), Xiaolong Wang (University of California San Diego),
Zsolt Kira (Georgia Institute of Technology)
Effective with the CVPR 2024 conference, authors will be allowed to post to social media about their papers in submission. However, until the final accept/reject decisions are released by the conference, posts to social media must not identify the conference name. If enacted, this motion supersedes all prior motions on social media.
Background: While the social media ban had good intentions, fair enforcement is not possible. The current ban prevents authors from posting on social media, but does not prevent people from the same institution as the authors from promoting papers on social media. It also does not prevent people outside of the computer vision community, who often have significant public influence, from sharing papers on social media. Consequently, the effect of the ban has been that well-known authors receive promotion regardless, while other authors receive no promotion at all.
Results:
All 3 motions passed.CVPR 2022 PAMI-TC Meeting
Logistics and Motions
This year’s PAMI-TC meeting will be held in-person at CVPR 2022, and is planned for Tuesday, June 21st at 6:00pm (directly following the last sessions of the day). Please mark this on your calendars. An attempt will be made simultaneously broadcast the meeting live on the virtual conference platform for remote attendees.
All attendees of CVPR 2022 are eligible to vote for the motions specific to the June TC meeting listed below.
Motion 1: Withdrawn Submissions Will No Longer be Made Inaccessible to Reviewers.
Proposed by Simon Niklaus (Adobe Research)
After reviews have been released, authors may opt to withdraw their submission which currently makes this submission inaccessible to the involved reviewers. In turn, this practice prevents reviewers from reading the assessment of the other reviewers. However, reviewers may want to hear what their peers had to say to improve their own reviewing skills. For example, reviewers may wonder whether their assessment is in line with the reviews of others or whether they missed any key points. To change this, this motion aims to end the practice of making withdrawn submissions inaccessible to reviewers such that they have the option to grow from the assessments of their peers.
Clarifying Questions:
But shouldn’t a withdrawn submission be removed from circulating? Just because the current practice removes papers from the submission page does not mean that reviewers no longer have access to them. After all, reviewers can always save a copy of a submission on their own device before it has been withdrawn.
But shouldn’t a withdrawn submission no longer be considered? This motion will not change that. After a submission has been withdrawn, it and its reviews will be made read-only in the submission page. Reviewers will not be asked and will not be able to further engage in the decision-making process.
Motion 2: Making Authors Responsible for Reviewing.
Proposed by Terry Boult (UCCS)
Given the importance of high-quality reviewing to CVPR, the need for every paper to have at least 3 reviews, and the presence of authors who benefit professionally from the community but do not contribute any service to it, the following change to the review process is proposed:
All authors, except those who are area/general chairs, are automatically added to the reviewer pool. Area chairs may assign up to 3 papers to these author-reviewers, per author submission, but may also choose to not assign any papers. Only the program chairs can provide exceptions to authors for these reviewing duties, e.g., for medical or family reasons.
Motion 3: Penalties for Violations of the CVPR Reviewing Guidelines.
Proposed by Terry Boult (UCCS) and Walter Scheirer (Notre Dame)
Any reviewer who has accepted an invitation to review but violates the reviewing guidelines set forth by the conference will be prohibited from submitting any papers to CVPR for up to two years. Only area chairs and program chairs will be allowed to flag such violations. The program chairs will make the final decision to apply a penalty to a reviewer based on the recommendation of an area chair and/or their own judgement. Reviewers with an active penalty will be placed on a list, maintained by the PAMI TC, which will be provided to the program chairs of each edition of CVPR.
In order to set appropriate expectations, all reviewers will read and agree to the reviewing guidelines after accepting the invitation to review. Further, reviewers will be required to take and pass a short quiz that emphasizes the most salient aspects of the guidelines. Scores from these quizzes will be made available to the area chairs and program chairs during the reviewer assignment phase of the review cycle.
Motion 4: CVPR Statement Condemning Russian Invasion of Ukraine.
Proposed by Anna Rohrbach (Berkeley)
CVPR condemns in the strongest possible terms the actions of the Russian Federation government in invading the sovereign state of Ukraine and engaging in war against the Ukrainian people. We express our solidarity and support for the people of Ukraine and for all those who have been adversely affected by this war.
The statement will be published on the CVPR homepage(s) while the war is ongoing.