Dear all,

I just received the FSE reviewing assignments, with alomst all the papers falling directly into our areas of interest and research. If you'd like to review a paper, please let me know.

I think most of the papers are really worth internal discussions..

Best, Timo

#401    MetaFSM: Transforming FSM-based Legal Contracts into Smart Contracts Using One-shot Learning with LLMs #472    Surprising Behaviors in Git Diff, Merge, and Rebase #525    DiffInk: Optimizing Source Code Tree Differencing by Leveraging Byte-Level Textual Differencing #576    AutoMerge: Search-Based Model Merging Framework for Effective Model Reuse #664    The Impact of Language Independence on Structured Merge Accuracy and Efficiency #787    The Influence of Prompt Engineering Techniques on the Security and Energy Efficiency of LLM-Generated Code #889    FastGumTree: Speeding Up Long Code Differencing with Hypertree Representation of Abstract Syntax Tree #1400    Janus: A Collaborative Development Framework for Foundation Models with Mergeability-Aware Adaptation #1897    Are Newer Library Versions Greener? An Empirical Study on Energy Patterns of Data Processing Libraries #2323    Bridging Textual and Structured Merge: Evaluating Language-Specific Separator-Based Merge across Languages #2326    Structure-Aware Delta Debugging with Geometric--Information Weights #2779    Failing with Purpose: Coverage-Guided Negative Test Generation from a Mechanized P4 Type System

-------- Weitergeleitete Nachricht -------- Betreff: [FSE 2026] Review Assignment and Instructions (Half Review Deadline: *October 17*) Datum: Sun, 21 Sep 2025 15:28:19 +0000 Von: FSE 2026 HotCRP noreply-fse2026@hotcrp.com Antwort an: julia.lawall@inria.fr, ctreude@smu.edu.sg An: Timo Kehrer timo.kehrer@unibe.ch

Dear colleague,

Thank you again for serving on the FSE 2026 program committee! After desk rejects and withdrawals, we received 925 submissions to review.

You are selected as a Rapid Response Reliable Reviewer (RRRR). Thank you for indicating your preference in the acceptance form! For this reason, you are receiving a reduced review load (12 submissions) in exchange for 0 to 3 additional reviews before the rebuttal period. As RRRR, you will help mitigate the impact of missing or low-expertise reviews.

Your review assignment is now available on HotCRP. Please start reviewing now.

Site: https://fse2026.hotcrp.com/ Your reviews: https://fse2026.hotcrp.com/search?q=re:me

TO DO NOW: Please download your assignment as soon as possible. We have checked papers for formatting, scope, and double-blind violations. If you notice any other issues or violations, including a clearly missed conflict of interest, please email the designated paper administrator immediately. The paper administrators are indicated in each paper's tags: #julia for Julia Lawall julia.lawall@inria.fr, #christoph for Christoph Treude ctreude@smu.edu.sg, and #darko for Darko Marinov marinov@illinois.edu. Darko is handling submissions for which both PC chairs are in conflict.

DOUBLE-BLIND:  Please do NOT try to actively identify the authors. In particular, please: (1) do not attempt to mine identities from Git logs, (2) do not click on DOI links that some authors have included in ACM references on the first page, (3) do not deliberately check document properties, and (4) do not perform detective work. Please note that we thoroughly checked all the papers for double-blind violations, but we cannot guarantee that we spotted every single violation. Hence, if you spot any such violations, we would greatly appreciate it if you contact the PC chairs as soon as possible, before even submitting your review for that paper.

REVIEW PROCESS AND DEADLINES: You can review papers from your list in any order you prefer. Please do not wait until the 50% deadline and start reviewing right away. To maximize the soundness and quality of our review process, we will be actively monitoring the quality of the reviews as they come in and will let you know if we spot any reviews that need additional clarifications, details or revisions.

PC members are expected to complete ****** half of their reviews by Friday, October 17, 2025, AoE *******

PC members are expected to complete ****** all of your reviews by Thursday, November 13, 2025, AoE ******

Please do *not* be late, because it creates hardship for your fellow PC members and the entire reviewing process. It is imperative that you complete your reviews on time so that we can proceed with the following author response and discussion phases.

Please submit your reviews as soon as possible; you should not bunch up reviews offline to upload in one go, but upload them as soon as they become available. You can always update them until the deadline. Having reviews early on will really help us with the reviewing process. If you do anticipate any problems with submitting your reviews on time, you should let us know as soon as possible and not wait until the deadline.

REVIEW SCORES: We will be scoring the papers as follows:

1. Reject 2. Weak reject 3. Weak accept 4. Accept 5. Award quality

If you believe that a paper should be accepted and presented at the conference, please assign a score of 4 or 5. If you believe a paper should be considered for an ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper award, please assign it a score of 5.

Please feel free to assign high scores even if you don't have high expertise; there is a separate scoring mechanism for reviewer expertise. We expect to see some papers with diverse opinions, and your score is simply a starting point for the online discussion. Please focus on *constructive criticism* and provide *strengths and weaknesses* with evidence to defend those points.

REVIEWING CRITERIA:

Originality/Novelty: The extent to which the contributions are sufficiently original with respect to the state-of-the-art

Importance of contribution: The extent to which the paper's contributions can impact the field of software engineering, and if needed, under which assumptions

Soundness: The extent to which the paper's contributions and/or innovations address its research questions and are supported by rigorous application of appropriate research methods

Evaluation (if relevant): The paper's claimed contributions are supported by empirical evidence

Quality of presentation: The quality of writing, including clear descriptions, adequate use of the English language, absence of major ambiguity, clearly readable figures and tables, and adherence to the formatting instructions provided.

Appropriate comparison to related work: The extent to which the submission adequately reviews the prior literature.

SUBREVIEWING: You have been invited to serve on the FSE 2026 program committee because of *your* expertise in the field, and it is expected that each PC member performs and takes full responsibility for their reviews; reviews cannot be simply "outsourced". If you would like to consult with colleagues with suitable expertise, you must ask the PC chairs to check for conflicts of interest in advance and acknowledge the colleague's contribution on the review form. If you want to train your Ph.D. students in reviewing and critical thinking, you are welcome to have them write reviews that you then discuss with them, revise, and score by yourself. Nevertheless, please be aware that reviews cannot be delegated; it is still very much your review that we want for each paper.

USE OF LLM: The content of reviews is expected to be produced exclusively by you and cannot be generated by LLMs. We also discourage the use of LLMs to improve the English and readability of reviews, because your queries to the LLM might be stored into the LLM server and later used to train a new version of the LLM, which may eventually leak your review if properly prompted.

We greatly appreciate your efforts to write insightful and helpful reviews for all papers. Many thanks for your service on behalf of the FSE 2026 conference!

Julia and Christoph FSE 2026 Program Co-chairs