The secrets I share with my students.

Preface

This document is something that I’ve curated over many years and I share it with my students. I’ve never shared it publicly before but hope that it helps others to write better papers.

It is a bit focused on my core community of computer vision, machine learning, and computer graphics; e.g. CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, NeurIPS, and SIGGRAPH. But I think many of the themes apply to any scientific or engineering discipline.

Good papers are hard to write and are rare. I would like to see more good papers so I’m telling everyone my “secrets”.

Who am I and is my advice any good? I’ve written about 400 papers. Of these, many have won best paper awards. But more importantly, they have won five “test of time awards”.

These are awards that are given for work from 10 years ago that has had a significant influence on the field. I want every paper I write to stand the test of time and these tips will help increase your chances.

Introduction

Conferences are super competitive. Good ideas get rejected all the time.

You may have a great idea but it often feels like reviewers are looking for any excuse to reject your great idea. Don’t give them an easy reason by submitting a sloppy paper. The more polished and professional your paper is, the easier it will be to understand, and the more confidence reviewers will have in your ideas. A well-structured and well-written paper conveys quality to the reviewers. Subconsciously, the quality of your writing will influence their judgment of the quality of your work.

So how do you write a great paper? It starts by reading great papers. Find a paper that you really like and then ask yourself “what did they do?”. Why do you like the paper? How did they structure the argument? A good way to do this is by reading the papers that won awards at the conferences. These are papers that the reviewers thought were good, the AC thought was good, and a panel of senior people thought were good. Their quality jumps out from the first page.

For me, this paper changed how I thought about writing papers

In it, takes a simple observation and then shows how to use it as a powerful and generic property of perception. What I loved about this paper was how he started with a revealing example (Fig 3). I had never seen a paper start with a simple example before but it made so much sense. Once you see it, you get the point immediately. Then you can’t wait to see how he uses the concept.

The best way to write a clear paper is to write a talk first. In a paper it is easy to get lost in the details. In a talk, you have almost no text and you know that your goal is to teach your audience about your idea. This forces you to present things in a progressive and natural order. The order you use to explain things in a talk is the order you should use in your paper.

If you don’t have a talk prepared, find a friend and explain your work to them. What do you tell them and in what order? What do they need to know to understand your contribution?

What questions do they ask you? Use this to help you structure your introduction.

First impressions matter. By the end of your intro, the reviewer has likely already decided whether they like the paper or not. If they are positive, you can still screw it up with a muddled technical description and poor experiments. But if they are unhappy after the intro, you are unlikely to be able to save things later. An unhappy reviewer stays an unhappy

reviewer. Make their job a pleasure.

The biggest mistake in paper writing

The most common and worst paper writing mistake that I see is not writing the paper. The surest way to get your paper rejected is to wait until the day of the deadline to write it. Students often focus on the code and results while ignoring the text. Here is a simple fact to commit to memory