| name | wacv-experiments |
| description | Use when designing or auditing WACV experiments, covering Applications-track systems evidence (latency, power, robustness under real constraints) versus Algorithms-track matched-baseline novelty, comparative assessment under the deployed condition, uncertainty over seeds and sessions, ablations, and evidence that survives the two-round review. |
WACV Experiments
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.
Evidence by track
| 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.
The four implicit questions
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.
Comparative assessment under the deployed condition
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.
Uncertainty and honesty
- Report variance: standard deviations over seeds, and for deployed/field systems over
repeated sessions or devices, not a single run.
- Do not overclaim when a gap is within the spread; say "within a small margin" and show the
numbers. WACV reviewers, being applications-minded, distrust hero runs.
- Keep the exact split, device, meter, and hyperparameters in the supplement so a Round 2
reviewer can confirm nothing changed silently between rounds.
Ablations that isolate the claim
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.
Reverify each cycle
- The two-track review criteria and any track-specific evidence expectations.
- Whether specific reporting (compute, energy) is requested in the current guidelines.
- Dataset licensing/anonymity rules for any data released with the paper.
Output format
[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>
