--- name: micro-review-process description: Use when reasoning about how a MICRO submission is judged — the double-blind HotCRP pipeline from the April deadline through the June rebuttal/revision window to the early-July notification, what reviewers score in a microarchitecture paper, the professional-conduct rules, and how the new Industry Track review differs. --- # MICRO Review Process Model of the pipeline a MICRO submission enters, anchored to the 2026 (59th) cycle as verified 2026-07-08. Committee composition and internal mechanics vary by year and are only partly public — items marked 待核实 must be reconfirmed on `microarch.org/micro59/` before being repeated as fact. ## 2026 cycle timeline (verified) | Gate | Date | Notes | |---|---|---| | Abstract registration | March 31, 2026, 11:59 PM EDT | Hard gate for paper upload | | Full paper | April 7, 2026, 11:59 PM EDT | HotCRP: `micro2026.hotcrp.com` | | Rebuttal / revision window | **June 3–17, 2026** | Two weeks — unusually long | | Notification | July 7, 2026 | | | Camera-ready | September 11, 2026 | | | Symposium | Oct 31 – Nov 4, 2026, Athens | | The eight-week gap between upload and rebuttal is when reviews are written; the three weeks after the window close is discussion and the decision meeting. ## What the process is known to enforce - **Double-blind, end to end.** Anonymity obligations persist through the rebuttal/revision window; artifact links stay anonymized the whole time. - **Format policing with teeth.** Submissions are inspected visually and automatically; violations can reject a paper even after the HotCRP checker passed it (see `micro-submission`). - **A professional-conduct clause covering both directions.** The 2026 guidelines state that abusive or inappropriate language in reviews, comments, *or rebuttals* can be grounds for dismissing reviewers, rejecting papers, and reporting to ACM and IEEE. Anger in a rebuttal is not just ineffective at MICRO — it is enumerated as a rejection ground. - **A separate Industry Track review.** The inaugural 2026 track advertises a review process tailored to production work — evidence standards that accommodate proprietary constraints. Main-track novelty framing and industry-track deployment framing are different games; know which one your paper entered. ## What reviewers weigh in a microarchitecture paper Composite of the community's public reviewing norms (not a quoted rubric — 待核实 against any published review form for the current cycle): 1. **Mechanism novelty and clarity** — is there a new hardware idea, stated at implementable precision? 2. **Methodology credibility** — simulator, baseline strength, workloads, sampling; the fastest score-killer in this community. 3. **Evidence-claim match** — simulation claims sized to simulation fidelity (`micro-experiments` instrument ladder). 4. **Cost honesty** — storage/area/power/latency accounting present and plausible. 5. **Significance** — does the headroom captured justify silicon change; would anyone build it? A practical corollary: reviewer expertise at MICRO skews toward *methodology forensics*. Expect at least one review that reconstructs your simulator config from the paper and interrogates the discrepancies. ## Reading the outcome space MICRO 2026's public timeline names one rebuttal/revision window and one notification date; whether the cycle offered conditional accepts or shepherding is 待核实. Plan against the simple model: ```text accept -> camera-ready sprint (Sept 11) + artifact evaluation decision reject -> triage: fixable-methodology vs wrong-venue vs insufficient-headroom next slots: ASPLOS Sept 9 '26 · ISCA Nov 17 '26 · HPCA July '27 · MICRO Apr '27 resubmit rule: fix what reviews falsified, re-verify every date on live pages ``` Keep the reviews regardless of outcome — architecture PCs overlap heavily across MICRO/ISCA/HPCA/ASPLOS, and a resubmission that ignores prior reviews may meet its own reviewer again. ## Anatomy of a typical architecture review Expect each review to contain, in some order: a summary paragraph (check it — a wrong summary means the paper failed to communicate, and the rebuttal's first job is a polite correction), a strengths list, a weaknesses list where methodology items dominate, and detailed questions. Useful triage signals: - A review whose weaknesses are all *questions* is winnable in rebuttal; a review whose weaknesses are all *assertions* needs numbers to move. - The most senior-sounding review is not automatically the decision driver; the review with the most specific methodology engagement usually is. - Uniform mid-scores with shallow text often mean the paper landed outside every reviewer's exact expertise — a topic-checkbox lesson for the resubmission. Score scales, reviewer counts, and whether an online discussion precedes the PC meeting are internal mechanics that vary by year: 待核实, do not assume. ## Leverage points for authors - **Before submission:** topic checkboxes in HotCRP (steer toward mechanism expertise), abstract quality (bidding happens on it), format cleanliness. - **During review:** nothing. Do not update linked repos in identifying ways; the submission is frozen. - **Rebuttal window:** the only mid-process input — see `micro-author-response` for how to spend two weeks well. - **After notification:** AE participation (badges strengthen the published record), Top Picks nomination season (IEEE Micro selects from the year's architecture papers). ## Calibrating expectations Flagship-architecture acceptance rates historically sit in the high-teens to low-twenties percent (exact per-year figures 待核实 from PC-chair reports or the proceedings front matter — do not quote a number without a source). The planning consequence is not pessimism but *lattice thinking*: a strong paper's expected path to publication is one to two cycles across the four venues, which is why `micro-workflow` treats every submission as having a plan B with a date on it, and why reviews — even from a rejection — are the highest-value artifact the process returns. ## Output format ```text [Stage] pre-submission / under review / rebuttal window / post-notification [Days to next gate] [Reviewer-lens self-score] mechanism / methodology / evidence-match / cost / significance: 1-5 each [Conduct check] rebuttal tone professional: yes / revise [Outcome plan] accept path + reject path both written: yes / no [待核实 before quoting] ```