Popular outlines for machine learning papers

Rob Zinkov
2015-06-05

When reading machine learning papers, I couldn’t help but notice that I kept seeing the same structures over and over again. Some conferences have one more often than the others. So, I decided to catalog a few of them.

The Theory Paper

This is the paper with the simple algorithm. You get this when you proved a nicer bound or the main contribution of your work is a faster convergence rate.

  1. Introduction
  2. Background (Graphical Models)
  3. Algorithm Details
  4. Theoretical Results
  5. Related Work
  6. Experiments
  7. Discussion

Note even if the algorithm is trivial, you will still see an experiments section. As near as I can tell, this is just because reviewers want to know you didn’t do this entire paper on a whiteboard.

The Systems Paper

This paper is for those projects that are more software engineering than new algorithms. Open-source libraries will have paper with this structure. Expect something in here about how contributors or lines of code the software.

  1. Introduction
  2. API
  3. More API
  4. Implementation
  5. Related Work
  6. Future Directions
  7. Conclusions

The primary thing this paper advertises is how easy it is to use a particular piece of software.

The Programming Languages Paper

This is really a systems paper when you see it show up in a machine learning conference. PL papers that end to be more theoretical will just go to POPL or ICFP. This comes up a lot for probabilistic programming.

  1. Introduction
  2. Language Description (types, terms, semantics, compilers)
  3. Example Programs
  4. Implementation Details (samplers, solvers)
  5. Discussion

The Algorithms Paper

This happens when you made a really complicated algorithm, that solves a particular problem. This comes up often because this algorithm is to solve a problem specific to a particular domain. You’ll see this for natural language processing and computer vision papers. Theory is something that is given little space in these papers.

  1. Introduction
  2. Algorithm Details
  3. Example Problem
  4. Experimental Results
  5. Related Work
  6. Conclusions

Note, this isn’t a systems paper. APIs are not talked about and you won’t be seeing many diagrams about the different components of the system. The authors had a concrete problem and this was how they solved it.

More to come

Think I missed a style? Tell me and I’ll add it.