CVPR 2027 Area Chair Guidelines

Area Chairs have an increasingly important role as key human decision makers in curating the technical program at CVPR. This is especially important as AI enters into the review process. In the end, you are responsible for your final recommendation, based on your assessment of the paper, reviews, rebuttal, and discussion. This should not simply follow the reviewer scores or AI suggestions. You are also responsible for writing the meta-review, not using AI to generate it. Use this document as a resource for any questions related to your role as an Area Chair. There will be updates and reminders along the way, but this should contain most of what you need. This document starts with the detailed timeline and follows up with some general advice. Please read all the way through. Thank you for your contribution!

Contact Info

If you have questions that are not answered by the information below, please first contact your Senior Area Chair (SAC).

Timeline

Here are the key dates, focused on AC duties, that we expect to work toward for CVPR 2027:

Nov 30-Dec 7:	ACs suggest reviewers and flag/verify potential desk rejects
Dec 7-Jan 8:	ACs may be asked to verify desk rejects (especially in Dec 7-14)
Jan 8:	Reviews due
Jan 8-Jan 22:	Emergency review period, ACs checking reviews and selecting emergency reviewers
Jan 25-Feb 1:	Rebuttal period, ACs checking review state
Feb 5:	Finalized reviews due, ACs checking review state
Feb 11:	ACs draft version of meta-reviews and decisions due (strict deadline)
Feb 11-Feb 19:	ACs meet in triplets, final meta-reviews and decisions due, including 2nd AC approval and Oral/Spotlight/findings/award suggestions (strict deadline)
Feb 19-Feb 25:	ACs may need to reply to SACs/PCs concerning recalibrating decisions.
Feb 25:	Accept/Reject Decisions go out

Main Tasks

Suggest reviewers (Nov 30 - Dec 7)

ACs will suggest reviewers for each paper that is assigned to them. For this, we recommend first browsing the paper. Think about related work that is cited and also closely related work that you are aware of. Suggest a diverse group of reviewers from multiple institutions and geographic regions. Do not only suggest the top-ranked reviewers listed by OpenReview.
During this time, ACs will also flag papers for desk rejection, e.g., if papers exceed the length restrictions even by a single character, or if an incorrect template was used to write the paper, or if any of the desk reject reasons in the author guidelines apply.
After PCs have released the assignment of reviewers to papers, please check whether you spot any irregularities (e.g., conflicts of interest). We intend to follow suggestions given by ACs where possible, but we expect that this may not always be possible.

Ensure that all papers have at least 3 quality reviews (Jan 8 - Jan 22)

Reviews are due on Jan 8 and the emergency review period ends on Jan 22. Prior to Jan 22, ACs should ensure that the reviewers have completed their reviews, send reminder emails if needed, find emergency reviewers potentially by emailing them personally if needed, assign emergency reviewers if needed, and read all reviews to ensure they are high-quality reviews. You are responsible for making sure the reviews are all available and high-quality. It is common to contact emergency reviewer candidates via a personal email prior to assigning them as emergency reviewers. Emergency reviewers should be assigned no later than Jan 12. If you want reviewers to expand on their arguments, share your feedback with reviewers early on. It is also your responsibility to escalate concerns to the Senior Area Chair in a timely manner, e.g., if you face difficulties in finding emergency reviewers. As you read reviews for quality, use the review rating buttons to provide feedback on exceptionally helpful or problematic reviews (see below).

Author response period (Jan 25 - Feb 1)

During this period, reviews will be available to authors. If any reviews are still missing, it is urgent to track them down or invite additional reviewers. It is a good time to make sure you have read the papers still under consideration.

Initiate reviewer discussions, oversee the discussions, schedule AC triplet meetings if you are the Lead AC, and respond promptly to emails from your AC triplet peers, ensure that final reviewer recommendations are in on Feb 5.

As soon as the final author response is entered in the system, ACs should lead a discussion via OpenReview for each submission and make sure the reviewers engage in the discussion phase.
The reviewers should interact with the AC and among themselves. Please make sure there is active engagement, especially for the papers where there are both positive and negative reviews. We strongly recommend that each AC go through all borderline papers (where there is not unanimous agreement among the reviewers) and engage with the reviewers in a discussion.
Please encourage reviewers to comment specifically on which of their concerns were addressed, and which ones were not. Also, when you initiate the discussion, summarize the critical concerns and ask reviewers to comment on whether they share the concern. Identifying these concerns will be important for the meta-review, so it is helpful to pinpoint them early on and make the most of the discussion period.
As an AC, please flag extremely delayed reviews, low-quality reviews, or papers with significant LLM usage not disclosed in the paper.
Prepare your draft AC consolidation report and preliminary decision by Feb 11. This will be verified automatically and you will be flagged if you have not finished this step.
As a Lead AC for a triplet, during this period, initiate the scheduling of meetings to discuss borderline papers. The meetings should happen Feb 11 - Feb 19, i.e., after the final recommendations by the reviewers are due on Feb 5.

Virtual AC Triplet meeting period (Feb 11 - Feb 19)

Complete the draft AC consolidation report and preliminary decision by Feb 11.
In the AC triplet, focus on discussing borderline papers but don’t forget to check clear accepts and rejects.
We recommend that every AC prepare a spreadsheet which you can present to your triplet peers. For each paper, summarize its contributions, the reviewer assessments, and your recommendation.
We suggest handling borderline papers as follows. Read the paper carefully prior to the triplet meeting and highlight key points of the paper. During the meeting, first present a borderline paper, its claimed contributions, and the reported results to your peers. Then discuss the key strengths and weaknesses that the reviewers identified. Ask for feedback from your triplet members, share your thoughts, and aim to find a consensus recommendation among the ACs in the triplet. If a consensus is not possible, involve your Senior Area Chair for additional feedback.

Final Meta-review and AC decision due (Feb 19)

During the AC triplet meeting week and by Feb 19, submit a high-quality meta-review, decision, and recommendation for special category decisions. A good meta-review summarizes the paper’s contribution, highlights the main points of the reviewers’ initial assessment, discusses the arguments of the rebuttal, summarizes the reviewers’ reasons for their final recommendation, and concludes with the recommendation of the AC and its underlying rationale.
Beyond the accept-reject recommendation and meta-review, secondary ACs need to approve the decision and meta-review of the primary AC by the meta-review deadline.
This will be strictly tracked and ACs with missing work will be flagged automatically.

Review special category decisions (Feb 19 - Feb 25)

ACs respond to PC and SAC requests to recommend spotlight papers, oral papers, findings, and award candidates, and to recalibrate decisions as needed.

Rate review quality and reviewer participation (Throughout review period, complete by Feb 19)

ACs play an important role in providing feedback on reviewer performance to help maintain high reviewing standards. You should rate reviews and reviewer participation throughout the review process, with all ratings completed by the meta-review deadline.
Rating submitted reviews: ACs may find some reviews more helpful than others. You can rate the quality of submitted reviews by selecting the rating button attached to each review. Use these ratings to inform the Program Chairs about review quality—both exceptionally helpful reviews and problematic ones that may warrant consequences under the Responsible Reviewing Policy.
Rating missing reviewers: For reviewers who failed to submit reviews, use the "Missing Reviewer Rating" button below the paper metadata. If no button is visible, there are no missing reviewers for you to provide feedback on. These ratings are especially important as they inform potential enforcement of the Reviewing Deadline Policy, which may result in desk rejection of the reviewer's own submissions.

Your Roles and Action Items

Reviewing Process Manager

Your main role is to help the Program Chairs manage the reviewing process for the thousands of submissions we expect to receive. When you are assigned a batch of papers to handle based on your research profile, please recommend a set of appropriate reviewers, and when some of those reviewers are delinquent or not responsive, please assign alternate reviewers in a timely manner so that every submission gets a chance to be judged fairly and expertly. We are looking for 3 quality reviews per paper.

This year we are also introducing reporting policies for LLM usage for authors as well as new policies around low-quality and delinquent reviewers. Reviewers are required to submit timely and high-quality reviews. One of your duties in this regard is to flag egregious violations of these policies by authors or reviewers to the SAC.

Decision Maker

From the moment all papers are submitted, perhaps the most important role as AC is making decisions for the CVPR program. For every submission that goes through the reviewing process, please recommend whether it should be accepted or rejected. The recommendation should be accompanied by a metareview summarizing the reviews and the discussion of the paper. If there is any disagreement among reviewers, the AC triplet meeting should be used for those borderline papers to provide solid ground for assessing the disagreement. Please do not hesitate to contact your SAC or the PCs if you find the need to discuss any submission assigned to you. In short we ask you to

Flag papers for desk reject
Engage in discussion with the reviewers to ultimately help you reach an informed decision (see next section)
Participate in or lead the AC triplet meeting
Write metareviews with recommendations for accept/reject

Among the important responsibilities of ACs is to ensure reviewers’ judgments are in line with the CVPR 2027 reviewer guidelines.

Also, it is important to make sure that the language used in the reviews (including the AC metareviews) is constructive and polite.

Discussion Moderator

Each submission is considered a forum on its own, and you as an AC have full responsibility in encouraging and moderating active discussions. When a submission does not receive the amount of attention that it deserves or requires, you should actively engage with the assigned reviewers and ask for clarification or argument. You should also “moderate” discussion by discouraging the participation in any discussion that is irrelevant to scientific claims and merits of a submission.

Encourage reviewers to consider author rebuttals. Considering rebuttal comments is a core part of the reviewer’s responsibilities. If reviewers do not do this, it will make the task of finalizing the recommendation much more difficult.
Moderate the discussions so that they are not toxic and focus on the scientific merits, limitations, and clarifications.
Pinpoint critical issues and ask how the rebuttal addresses these concerns.

Discussion Participant

We have invited you to serve as an AC because of your expertise and reputation. In other words, your assessment of a submission is a critical factor behind the entire decision-making process, and we ask you to actively participate in discussions not only as a moderator but also as a scientific expert. In the end you are responsible for the final decision not just following the average of the reviewer scores.

Confidential comments

As an AC, you may receive confidential comments from authors and reviewers during the review, rebuttal and discussion process. Please pay attention to these comments and acknowledge that you received them if appropriate so that the authors (or reviewers) know that you are taking them into account.

Meta-Review Guideline

As an AC, we trust you to make an informed recommendation based on sufficient knowledge and justified analysis of the paper and to clearly and thoroughly convey this recommendation and reasoning behind it to the authors. To this end, you have full freedom in writing your meta-reviews, although we list below a few items that have been found useful by authors when they were presented with meta-reviews. Aim to write a meta-review of at least 60 words.

1. A concise description of the submission’s main content (scientific claims and findings) based on your own reading and reviewers’ characterization, including the paper’s strengths and weaknesses. Ideally this description should contain both what is discussed in the submission and what is missing from the submission.

2. A concise summary of the discussion. In particular, it is advised that the AC lists the points that were raised by the reviewers, how each of these points was addressed by the authors in the rebuttal, whether reviewers have remaining concerns, and whether you as the AC found each point worth consideration in decision making.

3. Your recommendation and justification. The meta-review should end with a clear indication of your recommendation. Your recommendation must be justified based on the content and discussion of the submission (i.e., the points you described above). For your recommendation consider the following acceptance criteria:

Award: major advances that will heavily impact the field; will be used by many people, create new capabilities, etc.

Oral: potential to be very significant; worthwhile for the whole community to hear about.

Poster: incremental steps that expand the sum of the community’s knowledge or add bricks to the cathedral of knowledge; papers introducing useful tools; papers of interest to a subcommunity.

Also, creative ideas that are hard to judge but could be promising -- no one knows the future, so we should give the benefit of the doubt to plausible ideas.

Reject: unlikely to be significant or already known. Provide clear evidence.

FAQ for CVPR 2027 Area Chairs

Q: What are the borderline papers?

A: Once we receive all reviews, we will let you know which papers fall into the borderline papers bucket. We’ll primarily use the spread of the review scores to identify borderline papers. While the scores aren’t the perfect measure of borderline-ness, it is a good proxy to catch most of the borderline papers among a few thousand submissions that we expect ACs to discuss in their triplet meetings.

Q: When do we seek emergency/additional reviewers?

A: In two cases:

Assigned reviewers are unresponsive and the initial review deadline has passed.
Additional reviews could improve the confidence in your recommendation. This is an important part of your responsibility, as we strive to provide timely feedback to the authors so that they can appropriately and fairly respond to the feedback.

Especially if a review had not been submitted by the review deadline and the paper lacks 3 informed reviews, immediately start looking for and recruiting an emergency reviewer.

Q: How do we assign emergency /additional reviewers?

A: When you find an emergency reviewer (e.g., confirm via a personal email first), you will be able to assign them to the paper using the links in your AC console. If you struggle to find an emergency reviewer, please get in touch with the Senior AC paired with you as soon as possible. If all fails, reach out to the Program Chairs. Keep in mind, it is your responsibility to ensure that all papers have three reviews. This responsibility includes escalating concerns in a timely manner.

Q: When authors directly message ACs via OpenReview, are ACs obliged to respond?

A: Authors may leave a comment directed to their corresponding ACs using OpenReview (shown as a comment on the paper page). This is often done to flag concerns. ACs are expected to respond to reasonable inquiries promptly, and bring the question to the corresponding SACs if the answer requires further discussions.

Q: Are authors expected to cite and discuss very recent work?

A: We follow the guidelines in the author guidelines.

Q: Are authors expected to cite non peer-reviewed (e.g., ArXiv) papers?

A: Authors are encouraged to cite and discuss all relevant papers, but they may be excused for not knowing about papers not published in peer-reviewed conference proceedings or journals.

Q: Will the PCs share the review score distributions? How do I make a decision without knowing the curve?

A: We do not plan to share the rating curve. The goal of CVPR is to accept quality papers, and not be constrained by review scores. Please base your recommendations for accept/reject on the reviews as well as the contributions and merits of papers. Your SAC’s job is to help you calibrate if needed.

Q: When should I rate reviewers, and is it required?

A: You should rate reviewers throughout the review process as you assess their work. Ratings for each review need to be entered before the meta-reviews can start being entered.

Best Practices for Area Chairs

Judge each paper on its own merits:
- Do NOT normalize decisions within your own batch. Even with 15k submissions (lower bound estimate), a batch of 30 papers represents just 0.2% of the total -- far too small to reflect overall acceptance rates. Even a triplet batch of ~100 papers would constitute only 0.67%, so overall acceptance statistics cannot be applied in such small sample sizes.
Your aim is to get at least 3 quality reviews for each paper. Selecting good reviewers at the beginning will help out significantly later on!
Lead discussions: when the discussion period begins, post the highlights of the reviewer claims, and highlight any major points or disagreements. Ask reviewers targeted/individual questions to move the conversation forward! (e.g., R2 mentioned unclear novelty. Could R2 point to the most relevant works that overlap?)
Follow reviewer consensus for unanimous decisions, unless there are exceptional circumstances
- For example, to accept a paper with unanimously negative reviews, there should be significant referee error, or a very convincing rebuttal; to reject a paper with unanimously positive reviews, there should be exceptional circumstances such as significant previously undetected technical errors, or undetected fraud or plagiarism.
- You should be checking reviews as they are submitted, and catching fundamental errors at that time, not during the triplet discussion period.
For mixed reviews, you should analyze all reviews critically, and see if you agree with their claims. Make sure to get help within your triplet!
Keep your AC discussions within triplets. If you need a conflict-free outside opinion, reach out to your SAC.
Write a standalone meta-review
- This is a decision rationale, it should contain an argument why the paper should be accepted or rejected
- Avoid: “all reviewers said reject, so the paper is rejected” - this is not acceptable if a rebuttal was provided
Authors may not agree with your decision, but they should understand it (i.e., sufficient and clear arguments should be provided for why the decision was made).
Provide thoughtful reviewer ratings. Your feedback on reviewer quality and participation helps maintain high standards for the conference. Rate reviews promptly as they come in, and don't forget to rate missing reviewers using the designated button.