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Writing Advice for Fledging Machine Learning Researchers

General writing protips

  • DO: Write before you even do any experiment.
    • Your initial draft = hypothesis
    • Experiments = observations
    • Update your draft based on your experiments = posterior
    • Rinse lather repeat
  • DON’T: Leave everything to the last minute, esp. writing.
  • DON’T: Wait until the last minute to submit your paper.
    • Server overload is a thing.
  • DO: Read widely and a lot (in English!): novels, nonfictions, popular science, etc.
  • DO: Take pride of your work and paper. It’s your life’s work.
    • Haphazard, low-effort, inconsistent-styling paper signals to the reader that you yourself don’t care.
    • Why should they care about your work then?
  • DO: See paper-writing as a craft. Always hone your craftmanship.
  • DO: Obsess over styling (see below).
  • DO: Read math books and appreciate the typography & styling.
  • DO: Have a blog site. Publish several in-depth blog posts per year.
  • DON’T: Be afraid of people think you’re dumb based on your blog posts.
    • See my blog post archive from 2016 — they’re so simple and embarassing.

LaTeX protips

General

  • One line = one sentence
    • This will make debugging easier, due to how LaTeX shows errors
  • Quotation marks: Instead of "something", write ``something'' (2 backtics & 2 standard ticks)

Styles

Figures

Tables

  • Always use booktabs instead of standard table. See this.
  • Like figures, must also always fill the full width. See how.
  • Also, like figures, use wraptable if your table is not appropriate for full width.

Maths

  • Math macros: Use this and add your own often-used math definitions
    • So, gone are the days where you need to write \mathbf{x} again and again. Instead you could just write \vx.

Bibliography

Citations

  • Always use natbib! Two ways of citing:
    • ”… has been done before [4].” — in this case, you use \citep and write ... has been done before \citep{someone2024}.
    • “Someone et al, 2024 has done …” — in this case, you use \citet and write \citet{someone2024} has done ...

References / bibtex

  • Rule to live by: Dirty, inconsistent, low-effort reference list signals to the reader that you don’t care. Why should they care about your work?
  • Don’t just copy-paste from Google Scholar! Always recheck & edit!
  • E.g. make sure the proper capitalization:
    • Instead of: title={Introduction to Bayesian optimization}
    • Write this: title={Introduction to {B}ayesian optimization}
    • I.e., always surround the character that needs to be capitalized with { }
  • Venue precedence if a publication appears in multiple venues (top = most prioritized):
    1. Journal
    2. Conference
    3. Workshop/symposium
    4. ArXiv/preprint
  • For well-known ML conferences, simply use their abbreviations.
    • E.g. “Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35” -> “NeurIPS”.
  • For conference, use @inproceedings.
    • The only fields needed are title, author, booktitle, and year.
    • No need for other things like page, editor, etc.
  • For journal/ArXiv, use @article.
    • Use journal instead of booktitle.
    • Additionally, volume and number must be included.
  • Example:
@inproceedings{kristiadi2024sober,
title={
A Sober Look at {LLMs} for Material Discovery:
{A}re They Actually Good for {B}ayesian Optimization Over Molecules?
},
author={
Kristiadi, Agustinus and Strieth-Kalthoff, Felix and Skreta, Marta
and Poupart, Pascal and Aspuru-Guzik, Al\'{a}n and Pleiss, Geoff
},
booktitle={ICML},
year={2024}
}