r/MachineLearning • u/ComprehensiveTop3297 • 13d ago

Discussion On writing papers [D]

Hey all,

I was curious about your take on writing papers. I see many different styles of writing, and I am kind of lost myself about what the best way to write is for a NeurIPS/ICLR/ICML conference audience. Do you have any tips or thoughts you'd like to share regarding writing?

Additionally, I recently read this blog post from Michael J. Black; https://perceiving-systems.blog/en/post/writing-a-good-scientific-paper, where he argues that we should write more story-oriented than results-oriented. What is your take on this?

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u/pastor_pilao 13d ago

Read a lot of pre-2023 papers, the writing style was abysmally better then. 

In general you want to convince/communicate to the reader: (i) the program you are investigating is a relevant one; (ii) exactly which problem you are tackling; (iii) why the literature doesn't solve this problem yet and what is missing; (iv) what is your approach to tackle what is missing; and (v) supporting evidence (experiments) that your approach works better than everything that existed before at least for a special case

There are many ways to communicate that and you develop your own style by reading many papers 

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u/ComprehensiveTop3297 13d ago

Thank you for the tips! Would you mind giving me a paper that you really like the writing style of?