“Highly Opinionated Advice on How to Write ML Papers” by Neel Nanda

TL;DR

• The essence of an ideal paper is the narrative: a short, rigorous and evidence-based technical story you tell, with a takeaway the readers care about
  • What? A narrative is fundamentally about a contribution to our body of knowledge: one to three specific novel claims that fit within a cohesive theme
  • How? You need rigorous empirical evidence that convincingly supports your claims
  • So what? Why should the reader care?
    • What is the motivation, the problem you’re trying to solve, the way it all fits in the bigger picture?
    • What is the impact? Why does your takeaway matter? The north star of a paper is ensuring the reader understands and remembers the narrative, and believes that the paper's evidence supports it
• The first step is to compress your research into these claims.
• The paper must clearly motivate these claims, explain them on an intuitive and technical level, and contextualise what's novel in [...]

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Outline:

(00:10) TL;DR

(03:15) Introduction

(04:51) The Essence of a Paper

(05:40) Crafting a Narrative

(10:07) When to Start?

(11:41) Novelty

(17:26) Rigorous Supporting Evidence

(28:50) Paper Structure Summary

(32:30) Analysing My Grokking Work

(35:39) The Writing Process: Compress then Iteratively Expand

(37:09) Compress

(38:27) Iteratively Expand

(41:36) The Anatomy of a Paper

(41:48) Abstract

(45:03) Introduction

(47:49) Figures

(52:30) Main Body (Background, Methods and Results)

(54:51) Discussion

(56:00) Related Work

(57:24) Appendices

(58:35) Common Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them

(58:39) Obsessing Over Publishability

(01:00:29) Unnecessary Complexity and Verbosity

(01:01:41) Not Prioritizing the Writing Process

(01:02:28) Tacit Knowledge and Beyond

(01:03:53) Conclusion

The original text contained 13 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

May 12th, 2025

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/eJGptPbbFPZGLpjsp/highly-opinionated-advice-on-how-to-write-ml-papers

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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