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I am a ML researcher, in Industry without a PhD. The papers are absolutely for me. (And if they aren't then thats a major clique/circle-jerking issue, as I'm the one actually trying to apply what is being done)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-07087-2 This paper I recently tried to replicate for research on IoT cuffless BP, it absolutely fails to replicate. Not only that, but it also suffers from massive subject leakage on how it splits the data. It's pretty much overfit with a 75% overlap between signals and then it shuffles those between train and val. Even copying it's splitting approach I failed to get more than a MAE SBP of 6.07 and DBP of 4.3. Paper claims sub 2.0 for both.
Then there's this: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.19428. Maybe you know Grassmann flows and manifolds but I definitely did not learn this naturally. I pretty much need a background tutorial on this.
I actually enjoyed this paper's concept: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.14972 But needing to read 2-3 additional papers, one of which was super mathy proving out the intuition was a lot of work. It still takes me a bit to conceptualize this because it is DEEP in the bayesian world.
Maybe you are in a different subfield than I am, but I have consistently failed to replicate paper results for the occasional paper for the last 4-5 years. It happens, it's a thing. If I say that to other industry researchers they pretty much agree. One of the reasons we think poorly of academics.
Without looking at this paper I agree it is shit. This paper is not a machine learning paper (and basically nothing in Nature is). The failure to replicate is a problem of the culture of medical science and not ML.
Just because a researcher uses a compiler in their research does not make them a "compiler researcher", and similarly, just because someone uses machine learning in their research does not make them a "machine learning researcher". Papers at PLDI are not targeted at people who are "trying to apply compilers" and papers at NeurIPS/ICML are not targeting people who are "trying to apply ML". (If you actually want to see a "mathy" paper, BTW, you should take a look at the papers at COLT... these are definitely not for you and these are definitely hard-core proper machine learning papers.)
This paper is definitely an ML paper, and honestly is pretty reasonable. It's not earth shattering, but it's exactly the kind of work that I would expect from a decent phd student (which the author is). It's pretty bread-and-butter ML to take a model and explore ways to reduce the representational complexity of the model. Grassmann manifolds are outside of standard ML math, but the explanation in 2.2 was easy to follow. The math here is no harder than the math in standard graduate textbooks.
Again, this doesn't seem very mathy to me. The notation all looks like standard stuff from the Pearl textbook (admittedly not standard ML, but definitely standard for anything causal), and anyone who has worked through Bishop (which should be literally everyone with an ML phd of a certain age) should have no problem.
Having to look up 3 references to read and understand a paper seems absolutely reasonable to me.
We seem to have a different definition of what constitutes "ML Research". I'd break it down into two forms: Basic Research and Applied Research. Basic is probably not the precise word because a lot of core research is non-basic, but core is also an imprecise word, as is making a boundary around theoretical.
But Applied Research is pretty straight forward. It is the application of ML theory and algorithms/models to real-world practical problems. The "Basic" Research is generally more on developing the ML theory of what can work or is possible. You seem to think Applied Research is not actual "ML Research". I'm not sure the ML community agrees with you because there are prevalent conferences like CVPR or the NLP one I am blanking on. These are considered ML conferences, focused on a particular practical field. Industry research is almost always Applied, not all of us have the luxury of working on grants, business want returns and the research is around applying ML theory to real-problems. Like the Cuffless BP Nature paper. I think your definition is overly purity focused, though I imagine our tension is one as old as time between Academic PhDs and Industry Researchers.
The last two are definitely the "core/theoretical/basic" side of research because they aren't actually applying it to real problems. One's just a theory on Causal Modeling al la Pearl or Schölkopf. The pipeline is that someone like me takes these more theoretical models and implements them in the real-world.
Maybe I suck at math (a real possibility) or maybe you are just good at math (also a possibility) I still am very shaking on what a Grassmann manifold is. I don't think the paper is earth shattering in itself. I've seen several papers about kernelizing attention, or linearizing it, or anything to make it non-quadratic.
I don't think this one is mathy, but it is arcane on the applications of meta-learning as bayesian priors to allow a model to generalize across out of distribution problems during inference time. Claiming it can do zero-shot inference on unrelated tasks because it learns how to formulate problems as an approximation of bayesian inference in a practical amount of time is a wild idea. It's making a very complicated claim that takes a long time to wrap your head around.
Unfortunately this is a constraint in industry, I have a job, there is work to get done. spending 8+ hours to digest a theory paper is a large impact on my time. Even if it leads to something useful.
No. People who publish in these conferences do not consider these ML conferences. Historically computer vision and NLP started out as fully distinct communities with almost no overlap with the ML community. Since about 2014 and the deep learning revolution, the lines have been blurred a bit, but they are still very distinct communities.
NeurIPS/ICML are basically considered the same conference, and any paper that could be accepted at one could also be accepted at the other without modification (beyond styling); the only meaningful difference is the submission deadline. Similarly, CVPR/ICCV/ECCV are all basically the same conference with difference submission deadlines, and ACL/EMNLP/NAACL. You cannot, for example, take a paper designed for NeurIPS/ICML and get it published at CVPR/ICCV/ECCV without major structural changes, and that's we know they are part of different communities.
The division here is not academic/industry like you suggest. Bishop---who again is the prototypical author for probabilistic ML---works at Microsoft and you can find the textbook info at: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/cmbishop/prml-book/. The division is based on the conference communities and who publishes/reviews where.
Honestly, those papers shouldn't take 8 hours for a researcher to read. I had a pretty solid idea of what they were doing in <5 minutes, and I'd guess in <1hr I could fully understand everything about each paper.
The difference is that I am the target audience. Having done a ML phd, I've read >20 graduate level textbooks cover-to-cover and >1000 papers in great depth. If you haven't done this background work (which is fine---it's not for everybody, and I actively recommend my students not pursue this path) then these papers are not designed for you. You should accept this rather that complain that they are too hard or gatekeeping.
Ok I can grant that the conference communities are distinct. But I do think there is still some difference between those two papers and papers like these: CATs and DAGs: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.14485, Distributed Alignment Search: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.02536. I had a solid idea of what these papers were doing in ~10 minutes of reading them. But it took me several hours each to understand the Prior-Fitted Networks, then the math paper behind it, then the Causal Prior-Fitted Networks and lastly the Causal Foundation Models with partial information, at a level that I could apply or implement them. If you are saying that's because I am >20 textbooks and >1k papers behind on the background understanding, then sure I can't argue with that. But I could implement CATs and DAGs and DAS within the hour of reading them.
If I am not the target audience for any of them, how come some are more approachable from a practical side and others are not? I would expect truly being an outsider to have a roughly even level of penetration on the topics, not a wildly disparate one. To me that is indicative of a level of quality, skill on the author, or even writing to a wider audience (pretty much a skill) instead of writing to the clique (poor intent).
"Too" is a load bearing word that I don't think I have used. My complaint is some of these are fairly arcane, use complicated math to obfuscate a straightforward idea, or are deliberately being written in a way to gatekeep.
Some industry labs are essentially better paid academic labs, and attract prestigious academics. Google, Deepmind, FAIR, Microsoft, and plenty of small startups targeting PhD students. OpenAI started out that way. Other industry labs/research companies are far more implementation focused, in fact I'd say the majority are the latter. You'll get PhDs but also ML Engineers (like me) who transitioned as time/interest went on. And yeah we publish in the CVPRs and ACLs. ImageNet was a CVPR publication, AlexNet was a Nature publication, Resnet (major introduction of skip connections used everywhere in ML now) was CVPR. If you'd like to say those aren't "ML" then I'd say you definitely have a purity issue, if you want to grant them access to the vaulted halls, then its farcical to say that CVPR is not part of the ML community (doesn't need to be exclusively, I'd grant that the CV community and the ML community have not always had overlap)
EDIT: After mulling this over, you've actually planted the idea that many ML academics are essentially writing pointless papers that explore some weird theoretical idea but have no desire for that paper or theory to even get implemented in anything besides a toy problem. In essence, they are slop. And because they are circle-jerking slop papers, they are written for other circle-jerking slop authors in the wider ML community.
I don't see anything wrong with writing papers for a "clique" when you are actively trying to help people come into the clique who want to. The ML community has pioneered open access to papers via JMLR/ICML/NeurIPS breaking away from the older venues in the 1980s that refused open access, and basically every graduate level textbook is available for free online.
I basically agree with everything in your last paragraph. Except that AlexNet was published at NeurIPS, not Nature: https://papers.nips.cc/paper_files/paper/2012/hash/c399862d3b9d6b76c8436e924a68c45b-Abstract.html
Damn Google's AI overview led me astray. Good old NIPs was the publication. (Yes I know they changed their name to not be a slur). The other two I knew because I read them in undergrad. I could not remember AlexNet's OG home.
We might have different definitions of "actively". Yes they are open, but strictly classifying ML as a very specific thing is not. It still looks to me like gatekeeping a very specific boundary that is not reflective of the wider reality
If you seriously feel that the ML community is gatekeeping, then I invite you to come join the community and propose ways to remove these gates. There are regular workshops hosted to address these issues and improve them. In just 4 days, there will be a workshop on "The Future of Machine Learning Publishing" https://inverseprobability.com/sorrento2026/future-ml-publishing.html.
There are also more-or-less annually workshops at NeurIPS/ICML on improving the publishing process in ML. Here is an (incomplete) ChatGPT generated list:
(2010) : https://mloss-static.ml.tu-berlin.de/workshop/icml10/
(2018) : https://ml-critique-correct.github.io/
(2019) : https://ml-retrospectives.github.io/
(2020) : https://ml-retrospectives.github.io/neurips2020/
(2021) : https://neurips.cc/virtual/2021/workshop/21885
(2022) : https://ml-eval.github.io/
(2023) : https://sites.google.com/view/reconsidering-peer-review
I don't know of any academic communities that are remotely as open and accessible as the NeurIPS/ICML community. The NLP and CV communities have made some progress in these directions (due to the overlap of their members and the ML community), but even other branches of CS are way behind.
Thank you for the invitation, let me see which ones I could attend. Do you know if the Neurips/ICML host a professional society like IEEE or AAAI?
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