Tacas supplementary

TACAS Supplementary

Use this when assembling TACAS supplementary material. The governing rule: the paper must be judgeable from the reviewed pages alone. The appendix, the supplementary website, and the artifact support the paper; they do not hold the argument. Reviewers read supplementary material at their discretion, so anything the decision depends on lives in the body.

What goes where

Content	Body (within page limit)	Appendix / website / artifact
Problem, contribution, and the soundness claim	Yes	—
The core algorithm / tool architecture	Yes	Full pseudocode variants, extra config
The soundness argument	Theorem + proof sketch in body	Full proof in appendix
Headline benchmark results	Yes (key table)	Full per-benchmark tables, extra plots
Benchmark setup (machine, timeout, baseline)	Stated in body	Full logs, raw outputs
The tool itself + reproduction scripts	A pointer	The artifact (mandatory for tools)
Extra examples, secondary optimizations	Summary	Appendix / website

If a reviewer would need to open the appendix or artifact to know whether the result is sound or the comparison is fair, the paper is mis-partitioned — move that into the body.

The page-budget discipline

TACAS's llncs.cls budget (16 pages for research / case-study / regular tool; 6 pages for tool-demonstration) excludes references and a clearly marked end appendix. Consequences:

• Keep the soundness claim, the core algorithm, and the headline comparison in the body — they are decision-critical.
• Full proofs, per-benchmark tables, and secondary material go to the appendix (at the end, clearly marked) or a supplementary website, with explicit forward references.
• Do not use the appendix or artifact to smuggle in a result that would not otherwise fit — an argument that only closes with out-of-body material reads as unreviewable. Appendices are read at the reviewer's discretion.

Category-appropriate anonymity of supplementary material

[Research (double-blind)]  appendix, website, and any review artifact must be anonymous: no authors,
                           affiliations, acks, grants, cluster paths, tool identity, or repo owners;
                           route the website through an anonymizing host
[Tool / case-study (single-blind)]  supplementary material is named; the tool identity is expected,
                           but still ship a clean archive (no credentials, no .git cruft)
[Clean archive]            no .git history, .DS_Store, credentials, caches, or huge irrelevant files
[Opens clean]              verify the appendix/website/artifact is navigable and the README orients a
                           reader in one minute

The mandatory-artifact interaction (tool and tool-demo papers)

For a regular tool or tool-demonstration paper the artifact is not "supplementary" in the optional sense — it is a mandatory, evaluated deliverable submitted after the paper. Split so that the body makes the paper judgeable and the artifact makes every claim reproducible; the two must agree. See tacas-artifact-evaluation and tacas-reproducibility.

Vignette: splitting a research paper with a long proof

A paper with a new algorithm, a substantial soundness proof, and a large benchmark table: the body keeps the algorithm, the theorem with a proof sketch, the key benchmark comparison with the setup stated, and the external-validity limits; the appendix holds the full proof and the per-benchmark tables; the (voluntary) artifact holds the tool and the scripts that regenerate the tables. Nothing decision-critical — soundness or comparison fairness — lives only outside the body.

Output format

[Supplement status] ready / needs fixes / not ready
[Partition check] anything decision-critical (soundness/fairness) outside the body? <none / move: what>
[Page budget] body within 16/6 limit? references + appendix excluded correctly? yes/no
[Anonymity] (research) appendix/website/artifact clean of identity + metadata? passed/issues
[Body dependency] <what a reviewer can decide without opening the appendix/artifact>