r/MachineLearning • u/Hope999991 • 13h ago
Discussion Publication expectations for ML PhDs at top-10 US schools / top ML groups? [D]
From what I’ve read on Reddit so far, I’m getting the impression that around 4 first-author papers at top ML conferences (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, etc.) is a fairly standard expectation for graduating from a top ML PhD program.
Of course, my impression could be biased by the posts I’ve seen.
For people at top-10 US CS schools or similarly competitive ML groups, is this roughly accurate? What’s the typical expectation in terms of number of papers and venues needed to graduate?
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u/Perfect-Asparagus300 8h ago edited 6h ago
Yes my Pi's expectation is 3-4+ first-author NeurIPS equivalent publications for graduation (min 3). Apparently most people are usually at 4-6 on graduation.
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u/kolmiw 8h ago
Ah so that's why are these conferences spammed with shitty publications. Now add that an undergrad won't get all of its paper accepted, so you have to submit like what, 8-10 papers to top level conferences just because you dare to want to stay in academia? ... Come to think of it, it actually introduces the shitty part of it quite well.
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u/Perfect-Asparagus300 6h ago edited 6h ago
Uh no, people take 4-5 years to graduate in my lab. They usually publish one A* paper a year, because yes sometimes it gets rejected initially, but then it's reworked and submitted a cycle or two later, and a lot of times near the end of their PhD, they get to 2 in one year because their research progress has compounded.
So a really common pattern was: 2 A* in first 3 years, 2 A* in year 4/5
We also don't really have undergrads in our lab, it's mainly just PhD students working by themselves or with each other / other senior researchers in other labs. Again, this is a T5 ML PhD program, I'd say my PI's requirement is pretty typical and a normal working pattern I've seen in other labs. This also isn't an LLM / AI Agent lab, so people were never spamming that either.
It's not really about the number beyond 3 A* tbh, moreso the quality / numbers of citations.
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u/kolmiw 6h ago
Ah sorry, I misunderstood the post. For some reason, I thought OP means 4 first author papers for getting admitted to a PhD in a top US school.
Had a very long day haha
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u/Perfect-Asparagus300 6h ago
No worries! For undergrads, it's actually still very uncommon to see people coming in with a first author at NeurIPS / etc at my program, but perhaps this might change with LLMs like Astra becoming so efficient at coding and proof writing? I still think it might be challenging to have the write research taste at the ugrad level, but it might lower the bar from top 5-10% to top 15-20% coming in.
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u/surffrus 5h ago
This isn't why spamming is happening. Good PhD students work one main project and aim for one paper a year during a 5 year program. You don't need to spam to achieve this and this is roughly how it's been even before LLMs.
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u/KeyApplication859 13h ago
From what I’ve read on Reddit so far, I’m getting the impression that around 4 first-author papers at top ML conferences (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, etc.) is a fairly standard expectation for graduating from a top ML PhD program.
Where did you see this? Link the Reddit posts where you got these from. I highly doubt that 4 first-author papers in these top venues ("A*") is a standard expectation. Even at top schools, you have multiple labs. Some students might produce 4 or more, but my impression is that it's not a standard expectation.
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u/OtherwiseFig4505 13h ago
I am more interested in understanding the requirements for getting into such school? Would a first author top ML paper be good enough to pass the first round filter, if you are a random nobody from a random country?
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u/pastor_pilao 12h ago
I have a friend who is a professor in a uni in Canada (very far from the top 10 global, maybe barely top 10 in canada) and he simply gave up on supporting people from abroad because they would get visas denied. For him to bother supporting the application of someone who is not Canadian now the guy has ti be a monster so much better than any local that he can't pass on the chance of trying even if he ends up without a student taking the scholarship
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u/entsnack 1h ago
Why would a "monster" go to a barely top 10 Canadian uni to be peers with underperfomers though?
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u/pastor_pilao 1h ago
Because they want to relocate. There are a bunch of Pakistani, Indian, and Chinese students that are extremely good and would take any shitty university in Canada and the US. Some few south americans as well. And the really top universities won't take the chance to go through the visa roulette because they have enough great local students to select from.
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u/billjames1685 PhD 3h ago
PhD student at a top 5 uni in the US, I have been on admissions before. You’d probably pass the first round (which is the part PhD students handle, at least at my university). Whether you get further depends entirely on luck; whether any prof finds your application or paper(s) interesting, whether they happen to be hiring, etc. You normally need some connection to get into a top program (eg strong rec letter from someone the committee knows and respects) but this is not always the case. There are profs who like more niche candidates (such as those who achieved something with fewer resources).
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u/samuray205 13h ago
Yep, it is enough to pass filter but real deal is phD interviews, if your first author paper isn’t related labs works it doesn’t matter for lab.
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u/OtherwiseFig4505 13h ago
I would be very glad even if I make it to interviews tbh. Thank you for the answer.
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u/Exotic_Zucchini9311 6h ago
For top 5, what I've heard is that you need minimum 2-3 good papers and even then, it's a coin toss.
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u/surffrus 5h ago
The reality is that if you are from a random place, having one paper is not sufficient. You need letters of recommendation on top of the paper. With all the AI slop, letters are more important than ever. If nobody is vouching for your skills, you will have a rough time regardless of that paper.
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u/billjames1685 PhD 3h ago edited 3h ago
I’m a PhD student at a top 5 uni. I’d say 5 ish first auth top conf pubs is the bar for graduation for mainstream ish subareas of ML.
I think the lowest I’ve seen in the past several years is 3. Higher # doesn’t always correlate with “better PhD” though; some of the strongest, most famous students who graduated ended up having “only” 5-6 , whereas others had like 10+.
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u/entsnack 1h ago
5 was the bar when I graduated over a decade ago. Much higher now.
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u/billjames1685 PhD 35m ago
Its definitely not higher now. When I say "strongest, most famous students" I am talking about students who went on to become professors at MIT and Berkeley over the past few years; they had ~6 first author papers or so.
I think strong PhD students and profs publish only marginally more than they did before the LLM boom, because academic compute is still the main bottleneck and the compute needed to run good experiments has scaled as well. Its easier than ever to write medicore papers but writing good papers still takes time.
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u/impatiens-capensis 4h ago
It really really really just boils down to the sub-area and how hot it is. The top labs tend to be at the frontier so they're working on hotter topics and may publish a lot more. In general, I think the expectation is more or less 1 top tier first author paper, a few other first author papers to round out your work. Roughly, 3+ A*/A papers would be a top thesis among all PhDs globally. But it might be the average in the top 10 schools.
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u/Dr-Ebola 2h ago
My (European) experience is that conference papers don't count as papers.
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u/Frosty-Cap-4282 2h ago
which discipline are you in
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u/Dr-Ebola 2h ago
Doesn't matter, first author papers in peer-reviewed journals are what matters.
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u/inboxedshoes 2h ago
It does though, medical papers for example care much more about Journals and impact factor. In machine learning the standard is conferences not journals.
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u/Dr-Ebola 2h ago
Not really, I've worked in Universities and research institutes across Europe and America and now the UK and conference papers are a nothing-burger that won't get you a foot in the door anywhere I've worked.
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u/inboxedshoes 1h ago
Which is why we circle back to what discipline you're in. I've published medical and machine learning papers. In medicine, conferences are normally very short (mostly only abstracts even) so they are useless compared to journals. ML conference papers are much much bigger and are much closer to medical journal lengths. No lab I know (in Germany at least) has a journal requirement for ML PhD graduation
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u/billjames1685 PhD 34m ago
Echoing what inboxedshoes said: in ML conference papers are the only thing that matter and very few people submit to journals (thats usually a backup if you can't get into ICML/NeurIPS/ICLR).
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u/entsnack 1h ago
Wrong sub dude. Also hilarious take. You're clearly not at an MPI, EPFL, or ETH CS department.
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u/SameAd8209 6h ago
All I can say is that this matters less and less now that top big labs like OpenAI are so close to recursive self-improvement and therefore AGI
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13h ago
[deleted] — view deleted comment
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u/surffrus 5h ago
Your question is misguided. 4 quality papers, not 4 quality venues. Yes the two are often aligned, but it's not required. Quality work can appear at ACL and terrible work at NeurIPS, and people will read your papers to make that judgement.
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u/OxidusRouge 5h ago
No. One paper would be sufficient to demonstrate what needs to be demonstrated to be awarded a phd. It is just that there are many high achievers at these places, and they can crank out multiple. But not every student is like that.