ECCV Experiments

Use this while the experimental plan is still changeable. ECCV's calendar shapes the evidence problem: results freeze in early March, reviews weigh them in May against everything published since, and the field first reads the paper at a September conference — the numbers must still look current six months after the freeze.

The six-month-staleness test

For each headline table, ask: if the strongest lab in this niche publishes their CVPR camera-ready in June, does this table still support the claim in September? Evidence that passes: mechanism-isolating ablations, efficiency frontiers (accuracy vs compute), and generality sweeps across datasets. Evidence that fails: a raw leaderboard number 0.2 points above a moving SOTA. Build the paper's claim on the first kind and let the leaderboard row be corroboration, not the thesis.

Matched-substrate fairness

The first thing a 2026-era vision reviewer checks is whether wins come from the method or from what it was fed:

Axis to match	Unfair pattern	Fair protocol
Backbone / pretraining	Your ViT-L vs their ResNet-50 numbers	Re-run the top baselines on your backbone, or add a matched-backbone row
Training data	Extra pseudo-labeled or web data only on your side	A same-data row, with the extra-data row labeled as such
Input resolution / TTA	Higher test resolution quoted against lower	State resolution and TTA per row
Compute / epochs	4x schedule vs baselines' 1x	Report schedule; add an equal-budget row
Foundation-model access	API model in your pipeline, none in baselines	Give baselines the same tool or ablate it out

One honest matched row protects the paper better than three inflated rows — the mismatched-substrate objection is the most common substantive ECCV review attack and cannot be answered in a one-page rebuttal without a matched number already in hand.

Ablations that isolate, not decorate

• Each claimed component gets exactly one toggle row; combinatorial grids go to the supplement.
• Include the "replace with the dumb version" row (attention → average, learned prior → uniform): it distinguishes mechanism from capacity.
• Ablate on the mid-sized benchmark, not the smallest one, so effects clear seed noise (eccv-reproducibility for the variance bar).

Qualitative evidence discipline

Vision panels weigh pixels. Ship, in body or supplement: same-scene comparisons against the two strongest baselines; a random-sample grid (not curated) for at least one dataset; and a failure panel tied to the limitations paragraph. A paper with only curated successes reads as hiding something — the failure panel is credibility infrastructure.

Run sequencing toward March 5

T-10 weeks:  falsifier first — the experiment most likely to kill the
             claim (matched-substrate row on the main benchmark)
T-8:         main-table runs launched; seeds x3 on deciding rows
T-6:         ablation toggles; efficiency/frontier measurements
T-4:         cross-dataset generality; qualitative harvesting begins
T-2:         freeze new runs; regenerate all tables from logged results
T-1:         random-sample grids, failure panel, supplement tables
T-0 (Mar 5): body tables locked; supplement week polishes, never adds

Launching the falsifier first is the ECCV-specific discipline: with a biennial venue, discovering at T-2 that the matched row erases the win wastes not a cycle but two years.

Output format

[Evidence verdict] mechanism-backed / leaderboard-fragile / incomplete
[Staleness test] <headline table -> survives September? why>
[Substrate audit] <axis -> matched / mismatched -> repair row needed>
[Ablation map] <claimed component -> isolating toggle present?>
[Run queue] <next runs in falsifier-first order with weeks-to-freeze>