Disclaimer

I can’t tell you how you should read a research paper. You
might find a difference or customized style of reading more
suitable for yourself. But I can tell you how I read a research
paper. And if you think my approach makes sense, you can try
it for yourself and see if it works for you as well.
Agenda

1. What is a research paper?

2. Why should you read a research paper?
3. End-goal or motivation for reading a paper.
4. How to find the right paper to read?
5. How to actually read a paper - 3-pass
approach!
6. Tools to keep track of your pipeline of
papers.
7. Going a step further - Paperswithcode,
review, and reproduce.
Who is this session for?

-> People who want to develop competence and expertise in

a chosen technical field.

-> Folks who want to develop a habit of reading papers.

What is a research paper?

A highly congested and bland manuscript that compiles a

thorough understanding of any of the following:

● A problem or topic,
● A proposed solution or thorough research along with the
conditions under which it was deduced/carried out,
● The efficacy of the solution/research, and
● Potential loopholes in the study.
 What a research paper is NOT

● A well-informed summary of a problem.

● A white paper

Misconceptions ● A blog post

● An opinionated account of an
individual’s interpretation of a particular
topic
 ● Developing domain knowledge.

● Building a base on a profound

Why should you read study.

a research paper? ● Exploration

● Research and review

Which scenario defines you?

● Scenario 1 — You have a well-defined agenda/goal

and you are deeply invested in a domain. For example,
you’re an NLP practitioner and you want to learn how
GPT-3 has given us a breakthrough in NLP.

● Scenario 2 — You are still figuring out your domain of

interest and you are reading to explore. For example,
you want to learn how a new deep learning
architecture has recently helped us solve a 50-year old
biological problem of understanding protein
structures.
How to get started? Pick an area of interest

1. Pick an area of interest.

2. Read a few good book
or blog posts around
that topic and start Start reading about it.
diving deep by reading Move to references.
the papers referenced
in those resources.
3. Look for seminal
papers on that topic.
Find out seminal papers
4. Move on to
development! and start with them.
Apps & platforms to find interesting topics

● Subreddit - r/MachineLearning

● Arxiv Sanity Preserver

● Google research, Google brain

● CVF Awarded papers - The Helmholtz Prize

Method of reading a paper

The three-pass approach

Attitude while reading a paper

● Read as if the paper is your rival. Learn to fight with the

paper, don’t believe it unless it has earned your trust.

● Strive to understand and grok the paper by asking a lot

of questions.

● Write a review of the paper.

● Sleep on it and then try to learn from it.

Reading algorithm

● Print the paper

● Ask questions and argue with the paper

● Write a review

● Fight with the paper

● Sleep on it and come back to it

Example paper to read

Seminal work: Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in

Vector Space
Research tools and softwares for managing

● Mendeley

● Zotero (free and open source)

● Notion
Tips and advice researchers!

● If you read rigorously and critically, you cannot read

too many papers. Read no more than two papers a
week.

● Learning by doing is the only way to internalize and

truly grok a concept. Don’t just keep reading all day.

● Read seminal work over incremental work.

● General principled work over point-solutions,

ML Reproducibility Challenge

In addition to general goals, if you need an end goal for

your habit-building exercise of reading research papers,
you should check out the ML reproducibility challenge.
Research pipeline for NLP

1. Tokenization - (WordPiece, BPE)

2. Vectorized representation - Word2Vec, Glove, Blog: Word2Vec,
a. Seminal Paper by Yoshua Bengio: Neural Probabilistic language model
3. Contextualised shallow representation - CoVe, ELMo
4. Imagenet moment in NLP - Universal language model ULM-FiT
5. Attention is all you need - Transformers(Blog on transformers)
6. BERT
7. GPT-1/2/3
Reference links

● My blog on art of reading research papers:

https://dswharshit.medium.com/art-of-reading-scientific-rese
arch-papers-864f64fb73d2
● How to read scientific paper:
https://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2016/01/how-read-sci
entific-paper
● Three-pass paper:
http://ccr.sigcomm.org/online/files/p83-keshavA.pdf
● Video on reading research papers:
https://youtu.be/FukV7n8ztT8
● NLP paper on word embedding vectors:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1301.3781.pdf