FOCS 2026 will use double-blind reviewing. As such, submissions should not reveal the identity of the authors in any way. In particular, authors’ names, affiliations, and email addresses should not appear at the beginning or in the body of the submission. Authors should not include obvious references that reveal their own identity, and should ensure that any references to their own related work are in the third person (e.g., not “We build on our previous work …” but rather “We build on the work of …”). The acknowledgement section should be omitted at the time of the submission. The purpose of this double-blind process is to help PC members and external reviewers come to an initial judgment about the paper without bias, and not to make it impossible for them to discover who the authors are if they were to try. Nothing should be done in the name of anonymity that weakens the submission or makes the job of reviewing the paper more difficult. In particular, important references should not be omitted or anonymized. In addition, authors should feel free to disseminate their ideas or draft versions of their paper as they normally would. For example, authors may post drafts of their papers on the web, submit them to arXiv, and give talks on their research ideas.

Submissions by PC members (other than the PC chair and co-chair) are allowed. If any of the authors of a submission is a PC member, this should be indicated in the submission form by checking the corresponding box.

Recommended best practices for references. Authors are encouraged to include hyperlink cross-referencing for bibliographic entries, theorems, sections, and so on, using for example the hyperref, cleverref, or varioref packages. If helpful, a table of contents may be added on a page immediately following the title page; this will not count towards the first ten pages. Authors are asked to avoid “et al.” in citations in favor of an equal mention of all authors’ surnames. If the number of authors is large, consider writing “\cite{XYZ} show…” instead of “X et al. show”. Bibliographic references should preferably be alphanumeric (e.g., the first letters of the authors’ surnames, or at least the first three followed by +) followed by year of publication, instead of just a numerical reference. If using BibTeX, this can be accomplished by using \bibliographystyle{alpha} or \bibliographystyle{alphaurl}.

Prior and simultaneous submission. The conference will follow SIGACT’s policy on prior publication and simultaneous submissions. Work that has been previously published in another conference proceedings or journal, or which is scheduled for publication prior to November 2026, will not be considered for acceptance at FOCS 2026. Simultaneous submission of the same (or essentially the same) abstract to FOCS 2026 and to another conference with published proceedings or journal is not allowed. The program committee may interact with program chairs of other (past or future) conferences to find out about closely related submissions. Notwithstanding the above, works that were previously published or announced in another journal or conference with a significantly different format, content, and audience than FOCS might still be considered at the PC’s discretion; in such cases authors should contact the program chair prior to submission.