PMLR Proceedings Specification

Version 1.23 – Jun 28th, 2022

To publish a proceedings with PMLR, the organisers will need to provide the editors with:

1. A BibTeX file (described below) with the details of each paper in the proceedings.
2. A collection of PDF files (and, optionally, supplementary files).

The following specification is for simple conference proceedings that consist of one or more papers that are to be displayed in page order with links to associated PDF and supplementary files. If you need any clarifications, or need to publish proceedings with special sections, awards, multiple cycles, or other features, please email proceedingsmlr.press

The BibTeX file

In titles and author names, please use Latex commands for representing special characters (such as \'e for an acute accent on e.

For mathematics use standard latex inside two $ marks, e.g. $\int_{x=1}^z x^2 \text{d}x$.

Note: The contents of each field must be valid BibTeX (i.e., make sure characters are escaped correctly).

All of the conference and paper details are contained in a single BibTeX file. You can name it whatever you like but we suggest you use some association with the conference name (e.g., icml13.bib)

There are two types of entry that must appear in the BibTeX file:

• There must be a single @Proceedings entry with the conference details. It must include the following fields:
  • booktitle: the citation to the volume (e.g. Proceedings of the Twenty First International Conference on Machine Learning)
  • name: the long name of the conference (e.g. International Conference on Machine Learning)
  • shortname the abbreviation for the conference (without the year, e.g., ICML)
  • year : the year of the conference (e.g., 2013)
  • editor: the editors’ names (in “Lastname, Firstnames” format, separated by “and”)
  • volume: the PMLR number assigned to your conference/workshop
  • start: the first day of the conference/workshop in YYYY-MM-DD format.
  • end: the last day of the conference/workshop in YYYY-MM-DD format.
  • address: the location of the conference in venue, city, country format.
  • conference_url: the URL of the conference website.
  • conference_number: if the conference is part of a series, give the number in the series here.
  • Other fields may be present in the @Proceedings entry but these will be ignored at present.
• There must be at one @InProceedings entry for each paper. Each entry must have the following fields:
  • title: The title of the paper
  • author: The paper’s authors in “Lastname, Firstnames” format, separated by “and”. Do not use unicode characters, use the LaTeX equivalents.
  • pages: The page numbers in “startpage–endpage” format
  • abstract: The paper’s abstract.
    • It can include maths in valid LaTeX.
    • Make sure there are no special characters in the abstract, such as those arising from copying and pasting ligatures from the pdf.
    • You can use <em> tags for emphasis.
    • You can use <b> for bold.
    • You can use <ul> tags for bullets.
    • You can use <ol> for numerated lists.
  • Other fields may also appear in the @InProceedings entries but these will be ignored at present.

The identifiers should be in the form lastnameYY where lastname is the lowercase last name of the first author and YY is the last two digits of the year of the conference. If two papers share the same identifier under this scheme, they must be disambiguated by appending one of a, b, c, etc. to the conflicting identifiers (e.g., reid12a and reid12b). Please do not use UTF-8 charcters in these names (or the file names). ASCII only.

The Papers and Supplementary Material

If needed they can be disambiguated by adding an additional letter after the year letters. E.g. reid12a and reid12b

The paper PDFs must have a filename corresponding to the identifier of its BibTeX entry. For example, the PDF for the reid12a entry must have filename reid12a.pdf. These should all appear in the same directory as the BibTeX file describing all the entries.

Make sure all supplementary filenames for a paper with ID lastnameYY begin with the same ID but end with the suffix -supp (e.g., The PDF supplementary should be named lastnameYY-supp.pdf). These should appear in the same directory as the BibTeX file you provide us. Use whichever file extension is most appropriate (e.g., .pdf for PDF files)

Please do not provide a single zipped file with supplementary material in it. This provides a poor experience for the user. For software and video see sections below on Software and videos.

For example, suppose the paper with identifier reid12b had a supplementary PDF file with proofs. You should give us a file named reid12b-supp.pdf. The generated site for the reid12b entry will contain a link titled supplementary to the files reid12b-supp.pdf.

Sample BibTeX file and papers

Below is a sample of a BibTeX file for the 2nd International Conference on Examples (ICE’13) in 2013. It has been given volume number 57 and is edited by Jane Smith and Joe Bloggs. It contains three papers. It was provided as part of a gzipped tarball¹ ice13.tar.gz along with the PDF and supplementary files. The contents of the tarball is:

• ice13.bib (The BibTeX file below)
• jones13a.pdf
• jones13a-supp.pdf (Supplementary proofs for jones13a)
• jones13b.pdf
• smythe13.pdf

The content of the BibTeX file ice13.bib is:

% if the proceedings is a reissued proceedings, please add the field 
% 'firstpublished' to the entry below, giving the original data of 
% publication in YYYY-MM-DD format.
@Proceedings{ICE-2013,
    booktitle = {Proceedings of The 2nd International Conference on Examples},
    name = {International Conference on Examples},
    shortname = {ICE},
    editor = {Smith, Jane and Bloggs, Joe},
    volume = {57},
    year = {2013},
    start = {2012-12-15},
    end = {2012-12-15},
    published = {2021-03-29},
    conference_url = {http://exemplar.cc/ice2013},
    address = {Breckenridge, Colorado, USA}
}

@InProceedings{jones13a,
    title = {A Meta-Heuristic for Example Invention},
    author = {Jones, Raphael and Howard, Peter},
    pages = {1-9},
    abstract = {This paper considers the problem of inventing examples to convey features of an abstract specification. We provide a straightforward meta-technique to develop examples by writing any old rubbish that fills up space but still reads like English. Experiments show that this approach fares better than ``lorum ipsum'' text in a variety of cases. Running time (including LaTeX mathematics) is $O(1)$.}
}

@InProceedings{jones13b,
    title = {Example Generalization via Skim Reading},
    author = {K\"oller, Klaus and Frankel, David and Deutsch, Mark},
    pages = {10-18},
    abstract = {We show how skim reading a small number of examples can give a good sense of a more abstract specification. This is a complementary paper to (Jones et al. 2013) which shares the same first author as this paper and so must be properly disambiguated.}
}

@InProceedings{smythe13,
    title = {Are Three Examples Sufficient?},
    author = {Smythe, Byron and Gordon, Trent},
    pages = {19-26},
    abstract = {We empirically verify that, for the purposes of conveying the details of an abstract BibTeX specification, three example suffice. The related problem of whether three examples are necessary is left as future work.}
}

@InProceedings{vonHamburg13,
    title = {Handling Prefixes and Suffixes in Names},
    author = {von Hamburg, Hans and van der Petersburg, Pieter and de Gier, Willhelm and Hirst, Jr, Peter},
    pages = {27-41},
    abstract = {We demonstrate the ability of scripts to parse names containing prefixes such as 'van der' or 'von'. As a further extension, we consider suffices to names such as 'Jr' and 'III'.}
}

Sectioned Proceedings

We also support publishing in sections. To publish your proceedings in sections, add the following field to the proccedings bibtex entry.

@Proceedings{...
 shortname = {ICE},
 sections = {Preface|Contributed Papers|Invited Papers}
}

And then to each bibtex entry add a field defining the section e.g.

@InProceedings{smythe13,
  title = ...
  section = {Contributed Papers}
}

Openreview

If you reviewed your proceedings using openreview, then you might like to have the reviews linked to from the proceedings. If you require this, you need to add a section to each bib entry specifying the openreview code. e.g.

@InProceedings{smythe13,
  title = ...
  openreview = {zaMwvOjsyym}
}

Software Availability

Many papers have associated code provided. You can provide a link to a url that specifies the code. If you require this, you need to add a section to each bib entry specifying the openreview code. e.g.

@InProceedings{smythe13,
  title = ...
  software = {https://github.com/SheffieldML/GPy}
}

Video Availability

Please don't send videos as supplementary material. Instead you can provide a link to a url that specifies the video location. If you require this, you need to add a section to each bib entry specifying the openreview code. e.g.

@InProceedings{smythe13,
  title = ...
  video = {https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01z6agTRvOo}
}