KDD Workflow

Use this as the project-management layer. KDD's calendar is structurally different from single-deadline ML venues: two cycles per year, each with an abstract deadline about one week before the paper deadline (2026 anchors: Jul 24/Jul 31, 2025 and Feb 1/Feb 8, 2026, AoE), a rebuttal window inside review, and a Resubmit outcome that connects the cycles into a pipeline. Plan the pipeline, not a single date.

KDD is an ACM conference, not a journal: no standing editor, leadership rotates per edition (the KDD 2026 committee roster lives on the conference site; individual names 待核实 before citing), and the cost surface is registration plus, under ACM Open, a possible APC for authors at non-participating institutions — with a temporary 65% ACM subsidy announced for 2026. Verify all money facts against current pages.

Cycle-choice decision

Pipeline milestones (per cycle)

• T-10 weeks — evidence lock plan: four-axis experiment plan agreed (kdd-experiments); ADS measurement windows already running.
• T-6 weeks — mechanism freeze: no new components after this point; ablation matrix enumerable.
• T-4 weeks — draft in acmart: writing directly in the two-column format; scale runs queued (cluster time is the real deadline for large-data papers).
• T-2 weeks — artifact freeze: anonymized repository built fresh, cited in the PDF, smoke-tested on a clean machine (kdd-artifact-evaluation).
• T-1 week — abstract deadline: title/abstract/authors/track registered; all co-author OpenReview profiles complete (five-year history, DBLP, ORCID — chasing this is a named person's job).
• T-0 — paper deadline: submission audit (kdd-submission); ADS deployment quantification pointed to; resubmission declarations attached.
• Review window — rebuttal capacity: reserve author-days in advance; per-review responses under a link ban are writing-intensive (kdd-author-response).
• Decision — branch: Accept → e-rights + TAPS + APC status check (kdd-camera-ready); Resubmit → change-summary plan against the review contract; Reject → routing decision (kdd-topic-selection).

The Resubmit loop as a plan

# kdd-pipeline.yaml - one paper, tracked across cycles
paper: streamhive
track: research
cycle_history:
  - cycle: 2026-C1
    outcome: resubmit
    contract:            # concerns named in reviews = next cycle's spec
      - temporal-split rebuild (R2)
      - decay-mechanism ablation (R1)
      - scale claim beyond 10M edges (R3)
  - cycle: 2026-C2
    changes_summary_page: drafted   # mandatory first page of the PDF
    prior_forum_id: declared
    new_evidence: [table5_ablation, 2.1B_run, rebuilt_splits]
owners:
  profiles_gate: <name>       # co-author OpenReview completeness
  artifact_freeze: <name>
  rebuttal_window: <name, name>

The discipline: the review contract is written down the day reviews arrive, and every contract item maps to a change-summary line before the next cycle's abstract deadline.

Failure modes on this calendar

• Treating the abstract deadline as soft: at KDD it gates the submission and the track choice; a placeholder abstract in the wrong track is a real incident.
• Discovering an incomplete co-author profile on paper-deadline day — the one blocker that requires someone else's login to fix.
• Queuing the largest-scale run after the draft: at KDD the scale run is the contribution evidence, not a garnish, and clusters have queues.
• Winning a Resubmit and then re-litigating the reviews instead of executing the contract — the returning AC checks the named concerns first.
• Forgetting that notification and camera-ready dates for the current cycle were never verified (待核实) and promising co-authors a calendar the venue never published.

Vignette: one paper, three cycles, two tracks

A team's trajectory that the pipeline model handles cleanly: Cycle 1, the sampling method goes to Research and draws a Resubmit with three named concerns. Between cycles, the method also ships inside the company's ranking system. Cycle 2 now offers a fork: return the Research paper with the contract executed, or wait one more cycle and submit the deployed system to ADS with a real measurement window. The pipeline answer: do both, sequenced — Research resubmission in Cycle 2 (the contract items are done and Resubmit standing decays with staleness), ADS submission the following cycle once the post-launch window closes. Two papers, two tracks, no dual-submission conflict, each riding the evidence it actually has (kdd-topic-selection governs the fork; kdd-related-work governs the overlap declarations between them).

Capacity planning numbers

Planning heuristics — replace with your team's observed values after one cycle:

• Rebuttal window: one author-day per review for text-only responses; double it if any new run is permitted and needed.
• Anonymized artifact build from a mature internal repo: 2-3 days including the clean-machine smoke test, dominated by de-identification review.
• ADS measurement window: whatever the CFP demands is a floor; credible pre/post or A/B windows are typically weeks, which is why the ADS decision happens a quarter early, not a deadline-month early.
• Profile-gate sweep across N co-authors: an hour of work, a week of waiting on other people — start it at abstract-minus-two-weeks.

Output format

[Pipeline stage] planning / evidence / drafting / submitted-C<k> / rebuttal / decision-branch
[Cycle target] <cycle + abstract/paper dates from current CFP, AoE>
[Critical path] <three tasks that decide readiness>
[Resubmit contract] <items + owners, or N-A>
[Money checks] ACM Open status / APC exposure / registration (待核实 items flagged)
[Owner map] profiles: <who> / artifact: <who> / rebuttal: <who>