The 59th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture® (MICRO) will conduct artifact evaluation (AE) this year. AE has become a common practice in the systems community (OSDI, PLDI, PACT, MLSys), and has recently been successfully introduced to the architecture community, with ASPLOS conducting AE in the last six years, and MICRO doing so as well in 2021. We invite the authors of accepted MICRO 2026 papers to submit their artifacts to be assessed based on the ACM Artifact Review and Badging policy. Note that this submission is voluntary and will not influence the final decision regarding the papers.

Upload Artifact Submissions to HotCRP

Important Dates

  • Paper Decision Notification: July 7, 2026
  • Artifact Evaluation Withdrawal Deadline: July 14, 2026 at 11:59 PM AOE
  • Artifact Evaluation Submission Deadline: July 24, 2026 at 11:59 PM AOE
  • Artifact Evaluation Decision: August 21, 2026
  • Camera Ready: Sept 11, 2026

Process

MICRO 2026 is moving to a format where we assume that all accepted papers will undergo artifact evaluation. If you do not wish to undergo artifact evaluation, you must *withdraw* your paper from the AE process by the AE registration deadline. If you are planning to submit to AE, please open the HotCRP AE page for your accepted paper, check the “intent to submit” box and hit save. Please submit the artifacts according to the established submission guidelines. Submission will be then reviewed according to the reviewing guidelines. Papers that successfully go through AE will receive a set of ACM badges of approval printed on the papers themselves and available as meta information in the ACM Digital Library (it is now possible to search for papers with specific badges in ACM DL). Authors of such papers will have an option to include a two-page-max artifact appendix to their camera-ready paper. The optional artifact appendix pages will be free of charge.

Notes

Hardware access: We highly recommend supplying the hardware resources required to evaluate your artifact (e.g., over SSH), rather than assuming that reviewers will be able to access the required hardware. We may decline to evaluate artifacts where no reviewer has access to the required hardware resources.

AI-assisted artifact review: As part of the artifact evaluation process, reviewers or organizers may use AI-assisted tools to inspect, summarize, or help reproduce submitted artifacts. Authors should ensure that submitted artifacts contain only materials they are permitted to share for review and do not include confidential, proprietary, or sensitive information.

ACM Reproducibility Badges

ACM Badge: Artifacts Available
Artifacts Available
ACM Badge: Artifacts Evaluated
Artifacts Evaluated — Functional
ACM Badge: Results Reproduced
Results Reproduced

Artifact Submission

An artifact submission consists of two parts:

  1. The paper and a two-page appendix. Please prepare your appendix using the provided template. The appendix is expected to contain the following main sections:
    • an abstract
    • an itemized metainformation list
    • access to the artifact
    • system requirements and dependencies
    • experiment workflow
    • steps for evaluation
    • results
    Note that the paper does not need to be the final version, as the main goal of this submission is to let artifact reviewers reproduce your experiments.
  2. The artifact. Please make your artifact accessible by the reviewing committee. We do not limit the way of code deliveryi (e.g., GitHub, Docker, or VM image). However, if you would like to apply for the "Artifact Available" badge, your artifact must be placed on a publicly accessible archival repository, such as Zenodo, FigShare, or Dryad. For more details, please refer to the reviewing guide.

Please submit your artifact on our submission site. When you submit, please provide details about the artifact's software and hardware requirements. This will be extremely helpful for the Artifact Evaluation Committee to find suitable reviewers.

Benefits

There are major benefits to introducing AE in our conferences.

  1. Dissemination of Ideas: The goal of our research is to disseminate insights and encourage people to build upon that idea. Open-sourcing the artifacts and opening up the ideas to the whole community ensures that the community can work together towards solving an important problem.
  2. Reproducibility of the Results: Artifact evaluation promotes reproducibility of experimental results and encourages code and data sharing to help the community quickly validate and compare alternative approaches.
  3. Safeguarding the Review Process: AE incentivizes people to conduct research in an ethical manner. The recent example of misconduct in our conference reviewing process has greatly hurt the reputation of this community. Introducing AE can help to restore our integrity and commitment to reproducible and ethical research.

Artifact Evaluation Organization

Artifact Evaluation Co-Chairs Affiliation
Qijing Jenny Huang NVIDIA
Sagar Karandikarg University of California, Berkeley