CVPR 2026 Senior Area Chair Guidelines

Thank you for agreeing to serve as a Senior Area Chair (SAC) for CVPR 2026. This document contains an overview of your responsibilities and some guidelines for how to fulfill your role as an SAC.

As an SAC, your role is to oversee the work of a number of ACs, making sure that the reviewing process goes smoothly. SACs serve as the first point of contact for ACs if they need assistance or guidance. SACs are responsible for helping ACs chase late reviewers, assign emergency reviews, calibrating decisions across ACs, and discussing and deciding borderline papers. During the final decision-making phase, SACs will be expected to consult with the program chairs (PCs) on particularly borderline or difficult paper decisions as well as recommendations for awards and highlights. SACs are also expected to complete the job of ACs in emergency situations.

Contact Info

If you encounter a situation that you are unable to resolve on your own, please contact the program chairs at cvpr_2026_pcs@computer.org. Any questions about conflicts of interest or ethics should go to the program chairs. If the issue is related to OpenReview, email the OpenReview support team directly at info@openreview.net.

Timeline

Main Tasks

Preparation & AC assignment:

• Please ensure that your preferred email address is accurate in your OpenReview profile. We will send most emails from OpenReview (i.e., noreply@openreview.net). Such emails are sometimes accidentally marked as spam. Please check your spam folder regularly. If you find such an email in there, please allowlist the OpenReview email address so that you will receive future emails from OpenReview.
• Please log into OpenReview and make sure that your profile is up to date, so that you will be assigned relevant ACs to work with.
• In addition to the guidelines below, please also familiarize yourself with the AC guidelines, reviewer guidelines, and author guidelines. In particular, please review the LLM policy for authors as well as the timeliness and quality reviewing requirements for reviewers, as ACs will flag violations for you. You will be interacting significantly with ACs, so please make sure you understand what is expected of them. 
• You will be assigned ~24 ACs to work with. When you receive your assignment, look it over carefully and email the PCs if you have any concerns.

Help ACs with reviewer suggestions if needed (Nov 27 - Dec 5)

• ACs will suggest reviewers for each paper that is assigned to them. Please help ACs during this period. Your workload during this period should be light. Hence, make sure that each AC you work with has suggested the requested number of reviewers for each paper. If an AC has difficulty finding a qualified reviewer not in conflict with the paper, please help them. 

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

• Reviews are due on Jan 8 and will be released to the authors 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. Your role during this period is to ensure that ACs perform these checks, and that they are able to find emergency reviewers successfully and on time. We ask that all SACs check on their ACs if they have missing reviews, and provide appropriate guidance on how to make sure that by Jan 22, all papers have at least 3 high-quality reviews. We encourage SACs to quickly skim all of the reviews and point out any potential issues to ACs. You are ultimately responsible for making sure the reviews are all there and high quality, so if an AC is unresponsive, you will need to step in. Emergency reviewers should be assigned no later than Jan 12.

Author response period (Jan 22 - Jan 29)

• During this period, reviews will be available to authors. If any reviews are still missing, it is urgent to help your ACs track them down or invite additional reviewers. Otherwise, no action should be needed from you during this period.

Ensure that ACs initiate reviewer-author discussions, oversee the discussions, ensure that ACs are scheduling AC triplet meetings, ensure that final reviewer recommendations are in on Feb 5 (Jan 30 - Feb 5) 

• As soon as the 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. If your assigned ACs have not initiated discussions, prompt them to do so. This discussion period will be primarily for the reviewers to engage with each other.
• During these dates 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 SAC go through all borderline papers (where there is not unanimous agreement among the reviewers) and make sure the AC and reviewers are engaging in a discussion. If they are not, please contact the AC and guide them on conducting the discussion.
• If the AC flags extremely delayed reviews, low-quality reviews, or papers with significant LLM usage not disclosed in the paper, weigh in on the AC’s determination. If you agree with the AC, flag these cases to the program chairs.

Virtual AC Triplet meeting week (Feb 6 - Feb 16)

• Ensure that initial AC consolidation reports are completed by Feb 11. AC Triplet meetings may or may not have happened yet. 
• Ensure that the AC Triplets are meeting during the times that they scheduled.

Meta review due (Feb 17)

• Make sure that the ACs submit a high-quality meta-review by this date.
• Encourage ACs to suggest papers which are recommended to the findings workshop. From the AC Guide: “We suggest ACs recommend technically sound papers with solid experimental validation and contributing valuable insights, even if their technical novelty is more incremental. These are likely papers that ACs discussed in the AC triplet meeting but eventually didn’t receive an accept recommendation, and papers that reviewers viewed as having incremental novelty but solid experimentation.”.

Review special category decisions (Feb 21 - Feb 26)

• Encourage ACs to recommend spotlight papers, oral papers, and award candidates. 
• Respond to PC requests regarding special category decisions.

Best Practices

• Be responsive. Respect deadlines and respond to emails as promptly as possible. Make sure that your preferred email address is accurate in your OpenReview profile and that emails from noreply@openreview.net don’t go to spam. If you will be unavailable (e.g., on vacation) for more than a few days—especially during important windows (e.g., decision-making)—please let the program chairs know as soon as possible.
• Be proactive. It is your responsibility to ensure that the review process goes smoothly. Check in to make sure that the ACs you work with are responsive, help them find emergency reviewers, and make sure discussions are happening on their papers.
• Be kind. It is important to acknowledge that personal situations may lead to late or unfinished work among reviewers and ACs. In the event that a reviewer or an AC is unable to complete their work on time, we encourage you to be considerate of the personal circumstances; you might have to pick up the slack in some cases. If necessary, make a back-up plan with another reviewer or AC, and be flexible to the extent possible. In all communications, exhibit empathy and understanding.
• Please flag any concerns to the PCs in a timely manner.
• Respect conflicts of interest. If you notice a conflict of interest with a submission contact program chairs right away. Do not talk to other SACs about submissions assigned to your ACs without prior approval from program chairs since other SACs may have conflicts with these submissions. Do not talk to other SACs or ACs about submissions you are an author on or submissions with which you have a conflict of interest.

Confidentiality

You must keep everything relating to the review process confidential. Do not use ideas, code, or results from submissions in your own work until they become publicly available (e.g., via a technical report or a published paper for ideas/results, via open source for code). Do not talk about or distribute submissions (whether it is the code, or the ideas and results described in them) to anyone without prior approval from the program chairs. Code submitted for reviewing cannot be distributed. If you wish to invite an external reviewer, do so through OpenReview rather than sharing submissions through another channel.