Agent Skills
› brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills
› colt-workflow
colt-workflow
GitHubCOLT论文提交的项目管理指南。基于2026年2月4日AoE截止日期，提供从结果冻结、独立验证、附录优先写作到CMT提交及反驳阶段的反向时间规划与关键里程碑，确保理论论文按时高质量完成。
Trigger Scenarios
需要制定COLT论文提交计划
规划COLT论文的反向时间表
安排COLT论文的验证和写作阶段
Install
npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill colt-workflow -g -y
SKILL.md
Frontmatter
{
"name": "colt-workflow",
"description": "Use when planning a COLT (Conference on Learning Theory) submission calendar backward from the single AoE paper deadline — proof-completion and verification milestones, writing and appendix-assembly passes, CMT logistics, the rebuttal window, decision aftermath, and PMLR camera-ready with conference presentation in early summer."
}
COLT Workflow
Use this as the project-management layer for a COLT paper. Anchor everything to the live timetable: for the 39th edition the CFP (checked 2026-07-08) set one submission deadline — February 4, 2026, Anywhere on Earth, via CMT — for a conference running June 29 to July 3, 2026 in San Diego. Notification and camera-ready dates were not on the checked pages (待核实); take them from the CFP and acceptance email of your cycle.
Stage map
- Fit decision: confirm the contribution is a theorem a learning theorist wants
(see
colt-topic-selection); if the result is 80% proved, the clock question is whether the remaining 20% is verification or invention — only the first is schedulable. - Result freeze: theorem statements stop moving. At COLT this is the single most important date you control, because every downstream artifact (proof appendix, overviews, comparisons) quotes the statements.
- Verification: independent re-derivation of every load-bearing proof
(
colt-reproducibility). Schedule it as real work with an owner per theorem — it finds bugs at a rate authors never want to believe. - Writing: body-first is a mistake here; write the appendix proofs first, then distill overviews into the body, so the body never promises what the appendix cannot deliver.
- Submission week: CMT record early, anonymity sweep, single-PDF assembly
(
colt-submission). - Rebuttal: reviews arrive before decisions; block calendar capacity for the
window even before you know its dates (
colt-author-response). - Aftermath: acceptance → PMLR camera-ready and talk prep (
colt-camera-ready); rejection → triage between fix-and-resubmit (next COLT / ALT) and re-routing.
Backward plan from the deadline
| Weeks before deadline | Milestone | Failure smell |
|---|---|---|
| 10+ | All main results proved at whiteboard level | "The lower bound should follow" — it does not, yet |
| 8 | Theorem statements frozen; ledger of claims opened | Statements still absorbing scope changes |
| 6 | Full proofs written in LaTeX, appendix-structured | Proofs alive only in notebooks and heads |
| 4 | Independent verification pass complete; bugs triaged | "We'll verify while writing" (you will not) |
| 3 | Body drafted: setup, results, proof overviews, known-vs-new table | Overview promises diverging from actual proofs |
| 2 | Internal mock review by an uninvolved theorist | No one external has read the model section |
| 1 | Anonymity sweep, notation audit, cross-reference check | Renumbering theorems this late |
| 0 | Upload, re-download, verify the stored PDF; stop editing | Compiling at the AoE boundary |
Weeks are heuristics; the deadline is not. AoE means when it is February 4 anywhere on Earth — compute your local cutoff and subtract a safety day.
Verification is the critical path
For a theory paper the long pole is never the writing; it is discovering at week 2 that Lemma 6 is false. Mitigations:
- Verify in dependency order, most-load-bearing first — a bug in the master lemma invalidates weeks of downstream polishing.
- When a bug appears, immediately re-derive the weakest still-true statement and check whether the paper survives with it; many COLT papers ship the weaker constant that week-3 debugging forced.
- Maintain the claim ledger (see
colt-artifact-evaluation) as the single source of verification status; standups read the ledger, not vibes.
Team coordination template
# colt-plan.txt
DEADLINE (AoE): 2026-02-04 -> local cutoff 2026-02-05 11:59 UTC-12
RESULT FREEZE: 2025-12-10 owner: all
PROOF APPENDIX DRAFT: 2025-12-22 owner: A (Thm 1), B (Thm 2, lower bound)
VERIFICATION PASS: 2026-01-09 owner: swap (B checks Thm 1, A checks Thm 2)
BODY + OVERVIEWS: 2026-01-16 owner: A
MOCK REVIEW: 2026-01-21 reader: C (not a coauthor)
ANONYMITY + PDF QA: 2026-01-28 owner: B
UPLOAD TARGET: 2026-02-02 (two days of slack, CMT record made 01-25)
REBUTTAL WINDOW: dates TBA with reviews -> block capacity on release
Workflow failure modes specific to theory papers
- The moving theorem: a coauthor strengthens a statement during the writing phase without re-opening its ledger entry; the appendix now proves the old claim. Rule: statement edits after freeze require a ledger re-verification, no exceptions.
- The optimistic lower bound: upper bound done, lower bound "clearly similar to [X]" and scheduled for week 2. Lower bounds are inventions, not chores — either prove it before freeze or descope the paper to the upper bound honestly.
- The single-verifier trap: the only person who checked Theorem 2 is the person who proved it. Swap verification assignments explicitly (the plan file above does).
- The deadline compile: first full single-PDF build in the final 48 hours, discovering the restatement macros and cross-references were never wired. Build the full document skeleton — body, appendix, references — by week 3 even while proofs are placeholders.
After the decision
- Accepted: camera-ready per instructions; book San Diego-style summer logistics early (single-track conference, one venue hotel); decide who talks.
- Rejected with deep reviews: the reviews are a free verification report — patch and target the next cycle or ALT (deadline typically in autumn; verify).
- Rejected for significance: the mathematics may be sound but mis-framed; rework the motivation and known-vs-new ledger before blaming the result.
- Either way, reconcile the arXiv version with what review taught you.
- Debrief the ledger: which claims did reviewers actually verify, and did your internal verification pass catch what they caught? Calibrating that gap improves the next paper's schedule more than any template.
Cycle-volatility warnings
- Every date above except the verified 2026 deadline and conference dates is cycle-specific; notification, rebuttal window, camera-ready, and registration timing are 待核实 until announced.
- Whether an Open Problems track (with its own deadline) runs in your cycle: check the CFP; the 2025 edition ran one with a later, non-anonymous, 4-page format.
Output format
[Stage] proving / freeze / verification / writing / submitted / rebuttal / decision
[Critical path] <the unverified claim or unwritten proof gating everything>
[Calendar] <next official date + source, or 待核实>
[Owner map] <theorem/task -> person>
[Slack] <days between planned upload and AoE cutoff>
Version History
- 9f86f09 Current 2026-07-19 14:41
