Literature Study Tips

An alternate resource for reading papers can also be found here

Table of Contents

• Reading Research Papers
  • Steps to follow
    • Organizing the papers
    • Guide for a single paper
    • Questions to keep in mind
  • Some Sources of Papers
  • General Tips
    • Math
    • Code
  • Long term advice

Reading Research Papers

These are the notes from the amazing lecture by Andrew Ng, full video can be viewed here

Steps to follow

Organizing the papers

• Compile a list of resources
  • Papers from arxiv and conferences
  • Journals
  • Medium/Github posts
  • Articles/Blogs
• Skim through the list of resources
  • Make a table, where rows represent lists of papers and a column for a metric of how much you understood through skimming (10-100%) - Now read the one with the lowest value of the metric, try to understand the paper, if you can’t, go to the references, and read those till you get a basic idea of the paper
  • Keep doing this till you have a basic knowledge of the papers
  • Then select the papers you feel is worthy enough to be completely read
  • Reading around 5-20 papers, you’ll have some basic idea of the field and for implementing the works
  • Reading around 50-100 papers, you’ll have a deep understanding to do in-depth research (it does not mean you have mastered the field :smile:)

Guide for a single paper

Take multiple passes through the papers

• First Pass
  • Read Titles, Abstract, and Figures (only figures can sometimes summarize the entire paper)
• Second Pass
  • Read more carefully the Introduction, Conclusion, Figures and then skim through the rest (skip related work if you’re not familiar with it in the second pass)
• Third Pass
  • Read but skip or skim the Math
• Fourth Pass
  • Whole thing but skip parts that don’t make sense

Questions to keep in mind

Ask yourself these questions while reading the paper

• What are the authors trying to accomplish in this work?
• What were the key elements of the approach in this work?
• What can you use yourself?
• What other references do you want to follow?

Some Sources of Papers

• Top Tier Conferences like NeurIPS, ICLR, CVPR, ICRA, RSS, IROS (more on this here)
• Twitter
• Subreddits
• Paper Reading Groups, Communities and Friends

General Tips

Math

To understand the Maths behind the paper

• Read a few passes and make detailed notes
• Try to rederive the math from scratch on blank paper
  • If you can do this, then you can learn to derive your own novel algorithms - Eg. People from the art community sit in the art museum and they copy the work of the masters

Code

Download and run the open-source code and try to reimplement it from scratch

Long term advice

• Keep reading papers consistently
  • In doing so you won’t gain expertise in one day, you won’t get a lot of knowledge from reading one paper a weekend. But if you keep doing this for a year, you’ll reach somewhere
• One great project is better than many lame projects
• Focus on the team (people you interact with)
• Maintain a work-life balance