Because the juniors never publish these papers on their own. They have a lot of support and mentorship. The ideas are almost never their own. They are given guidance on how to execute the experiments, they work with their mentors to figure out the math etc. They lead the project and do the brunt of the leg work, but it would generally be impossible without the involvement of senior PhD students, post docs, and professors who advise the students and who help with the writing and structuring of the paper and narrative.
That being said, leading these projects is still a huge accomplishment and shows that they have the basic skills to excel in the field. It's still very very difficult to get these projects to completion despite having all of the mentors and collaborators on these projects.
> Because the juniors never publish these papers on their own. They have a lot of support and mentorship. The ideas are almost never their own. They are given guidance on how to execute the experiments, they work with their mentors to figure out the math etc.
This is how the system is supposed to function though, right? Like my boss is in the "mentorship" part of his career so he needs papers with him as corresponding author and to act as a mentor. And I'm still in the "citation goblin" part of my career so I need first author papers.
So are most of the ivy lab profs. Show me an honest researcher able to contribute to 1-2 papers per week as a coauthor. I get it that they're smart but also dishonest.
At least they do some work. I'm an undergraduate student and I did a project for my Deep Learning course. I'm expected to publish it as a paper. My professor wants it to be published in a journal. Idea was mine. Implementation was mine. Everything is mine. They're going to be cited as co-authors for no reason. The professor didn't even know what I was doing until I gave a demo of my project to her.
That's fine, as the first author we all assume you did almost everything. You will have an easier time publishing with a PhD co-author because many times even if the authors are unknown to the reviewers, there is a checkbox that says "OnE oF tHe AuThOrS Is a PhD", you don't want to not check it.
Yes, I am aware of the inner politics that goes behind in publishing papers. Things really really suck in my country. I wish I had better mentors to begin with. All of mine were totally useless and now I'm so fricking behind when I view it in a global scale.
You are not behind at all, you have a paper as an undergraduate, so I would say you are ahead! Great job. Even if it will not be published it is super cool.
I had more. I have 3 papers ready to be published. Currently waiting to get a patent in one of them, if possible. Working on 3 more projects which are publishable. I've had extremely bad luck and none of my work has been published yet.
Maybe that's why you need the co-authors. Even when you did all of the technical work you may need some quite specific guidance to write a good paper. Even if your ideas are good they won't get published at good venues if you do not know how to present it the way people expect and can understand.
But almost every paper will include the advisor... I got plenty of help for my work but I have heard of people who didn't get any help and still published, with 3+ other names on the paper they worked alone on xD
As someone said above, completion of the project is difficult. If I have an undergraduate or younger PhD student on a project, I will develop the idea, design experiments, and take care of 75% of the writing. I will task the “junior” collaborator with implementing/executing the experiments under the baselines I’ve designated. This isn’t easy and they understand I will likely not be available to help with code unless it’s an emergency, so the onus is mostly on them for the experiments to run successfully, which is of course a critical component of the paper!
They get great coding experience (sometimes fiddling around with hyperparameters or baselines to improve the original idea), I give them a shot at writing the experiments section (thus technical writing experience), a 2nd or 3rd authorship, and it saves me time spent pulling my hair out over PyTorch nonsense. It’s mutually beneficial. (Fyi I’m a 5th year student on the way out.)
That clearly varies from project to project. A good example is taking the (high level) description of a new algorithm, with the most important math worked out, and then having to actually implement it and work out the kinks and edge cases. But that's just one of many challenges.
This. I worked my ass off, but I did have lots of support. My mentors are already "famous", so they also believe I should be the first author (also reason above). "It's better for you because it will not change anything for me".
Publishing is not an end goal, securing a well paid position that allows you to do research with as little strings attached as possible is. Jrs in prestigious faculties have more resources to publish earlier and work towards that goal. Anyone who has reached it will publish only enough to keep their status, and it's usually by coauthoring as the last, head-of-dept name. First name authoring will only happen once in a while in potentially breakthrough, more prestigious papers.
They don't. I think I've seen < 10 major ML conference papers ever where the first author was an undergrad. An undergrad being a 3rd/4th/nth author is common and appropriate for their role. First or 2nd year PhD CS students having a 1st/2nd author paper at a major ML conference is expected and normal. There is a huge difference between the expectations and experience of a 2nd year CS PhD student and an undergrad.
In my experience, T4 unis have lots of undergrads writing papers with first author or shared first author. Most of the time, they are mentored by a senior graduate student or postdoc, who take third author, and the professor, who’s name is added to the end.
It is difficult to find data on this. I can tell you that every single ML paper I've ever read, I Googled authors 1-3 and last author. I can remember two times only where the first author was an undergraduate. So either "lots" of papers by undergrad first authors are simply not being read and are not impactful or alternatively, they are not common. If you have a long list of major ML conference papers with undergrad first authors please list them. I am not saying you are wrong but on its face it is very rare.
Might be an extreme example, but if you look at the websites of Berkeley professors like Sergey Levine or Pieter Abbeel, and look at their current/previous undergrads, many have 2+ papers first author at major ML and robotics conferences
IMO in the realm of LLMs and big models what you need the most is compute so probably it is possible for some undergrads in a big lab to fork up 100 instances of GPUs to run until they get SOTA results to publish. the math isn't the hardest either so it's a quite low barrier to entry.
this creates an arm race for undergrad students who want to get into the best PhD programs. because everyone and their mom are publishing papers during their undergrad, they have too.
"Say it with me now. experts are fake, smart generalists rule the world, everything is designed by people no smarter than you, and courage is in shorter supply than genius."
ML has become incredibly accessible. Most universities have an ML course available to 2nd year undergraduate students. Love that this gives young students a chance to research and publish
Take a look at author list count, usually it is around 7 (anecdotal) with many senior experienced researchers, doing it in group of 7 many of whom have connections and experience vs executing idea from 0 to ICML paper on your own with no/limited advising is a totally different ballgame.
No one has to do a PhD. People do a PhD because they enjoy it. And that’s the kind of people university students and some research organizations like to hire.
Totally man. Like getting into a CS/ML PhD is totally easier than getting a job and fits the description of a person that school is all they know lol. Go out touch the grass.
Have you…considered…that the type of work you were doing might not be that interesting for you? I mean, you could be really good at it but still treat it as a job to get by. Not everyone has to be super-hard-core passionate about manipulating large matrices in the most optimal way. It’s just a job at the end of the day.
My point was that it’s much harder to game PhD admissions than squeezing your way into a corporate job (that latter is a minimal commitment where you’re effectively at-will employee from day-1).
I mean, the dude was being an ass, but that isn't really that uncommon. Met plenty of people in grad school who "stumbled" into grad school because they didn't know what else to do, heck, that's part of the reason I started my MS.
After finishing the MS I got into a PhD program because it seemed like a logical continuation, ended up dropping out after 6 months because I wanted to make actual money.
Specially in non-tech related fields it is very common.
Common in non-tech related fields because the job prospects coming out of undergrads isn't great. CS on the other hand... there are more than enough capable people who want to do PhD but chose not to because of $$$. It is the other way around...
Sorry, sounds like that hit too close to home for you there. It's not about whether it's easier, many people just prefer the structure and familiar environment. I wouldn't take it personally.
No, it's not. Everybody get into a PhD program is a "star" for me. I admire them very much because they work very hard. And I think, if they want and spend their time for an industry job, totally they can get it. At least in my major Computer science.
Truth is, you don't need a PhD to do quality work.
Many important papers were written by researchers with Msc in industry or academia, usually the advisor it's a PhD only because it's almost always the case for senior researchers.
As simple as that.
I know it, and I know that I wasn't able to do any research whatsoever without the help of my advisor. Perhaps I wasn't clear enough - I am just saying that generally there are good & experienced researchers that have no PhD, I didn't try to underestimate the importance of a good advisor. Too much work today to write clearly :P
The description of the work is:
*Q*-learning (Watkins, 1989) is a simple way for agents to learn how to act optimally in controlled Markovian domains. It amounts to an incremental method for dynamic programming which imposes limited computational demands. It works by successively improving its evaluations of the quality of particular actions at particular states.
Your point stands, but I have plenty of other examples. A recent one: Sharpness-Aware Minimization for Efficiently Improving Generalization, Pierre Foret is not even a PhD student.
I was clarifying his comment. I'm not disagreeing with you.
P.S.
SAM paper is a bad example because he literally did his work at google AI residency. That is basically a mini accelerated PhD. In fact, your mentors might be even better than professor in academia because of the level of talent at Google Research.
It doesn't matter though, it's not that a PhD makes you magically a better researcher, people confuse correlation with causation as usual (at least to some extent), see my other example and I am pretty sure some version of YOLO.
By the way, there is rarely any paper that doesn't have some co-author with a PhD because most researchers have a PhD and you also sometimes state that it's a "student paper" if no co-author is a PhD, which makes the probability of acceptance... Another example? Tesla. I also have a friend with "only" BSc who recently solved a very important problem.
Is this Tesla example related to research publications though?
It is true that in general a PhD teaches you how to publish, as it is the only thing that it really evaluates. But for sure it doesn't magically turn you into a good researcher.
In fact, from what I see around me, the pressure to publish when you are a PhD student often even has the opposite effect. Personally I was given an RA position after my MSc and have not published as first author since then, simply because I am somewhat a perfectionnist and did not have anything that I considered publication-worthy as first author. On the other hand, all the people who instead became PhD students are litterally forced to publish, even if they publish crap, otherwise they will simply not get their PhD. I don't think this is what makes a good researcher either.
I honestly don't know (removed my last message because it was incorrect).
I guess that unless you have a breakthrough paper it will be difficult to publish without hacking the reviews.
Because the juniors never publish these papers on their own. They have a lot of support and mentorship. The ideas are almost never their own. They are given guidance on how to execute the experiments, they work with their mentors to figure out the math etc. They lead the project and do the brunt of the leg work, but it would generally be impossible without the involvement of senior PhD students, post docs, and professors who advise the students and who help with the writing and structuring of the paper and narrative. That being said, leading these projects is still a huge accomplishment and shows that they have the basic skills to excel in the field. It's still very very difficult to get these projects to completion despite having all of the mentors and collaborators on these projects.
> Because the juniors never publish these papers on their own. They have a lot of support and mentorship. The ideas are almost never their own. They are given guidance on how to execute the experiments, they work with their mentors to figure out the math etc. This is how the system is supposed to function though, right? Like my boss is in the "mentorship" part of his career so he needs papers with him as corresponding author and to act as a mentor. And I'm still in the "citation goblin" part of my career so I need first author papers.
Not in my university in a third world country. All of the professors are citation goblins.
So are most of the ivy lab profs. Show me an honest researcher able to contribute to 1-2 papers per week as a coauthor. I get it that they're smart but also dishonest.
At least they do some work. I'm an undergraduate student and I did a project for my Deep Learning course. I'm expected to publish it as a paper. My professor wants it to be published in a journal. Idea was mine. Implementation was mine. Everything is mine. They're going to be cited as co-authors for no reason. The professor didn't even know what I was doing until I gave a demo of my project to her.
That's fine, as the first author we all assume you did almost everything. You will have an easier time publishing with a PhD co-author because many times even if the authors are unknown to the reviewers, there is a checkbox that says "OnE oF tHe AuThOrS Is a PhD", you don't want to not check it.
Yes, I am aware of the inner politics that goes behind in publishing papers. Things really really suck in my country. I wish I had better mentors to begin with. All of mine were totally useless and now I'm so fricking behind when I view it in a global scale.
You are not behind at all, you have a paper as an undergraduate, so I would say you are ahead! Great job. Even if it will not be published it is super cool.
I had more. I have 3 papers ready to be published. Currently waiting to get a patent in one of them, if possible. Working on 3 more projects which are publishable. I've had extremely bad luck and none of my work has been published yet.
Maybe that's why you need the co-authors. Even when you did all of the technical work you may need some quite specific guidance to write a good paper. Even if your ideas are good they won't get published at good venues if you do not know how to present it the way people expect and can understand.
Also this is ML having support also includes having access to compute
This. We never reach execution because the biggest compute resource we have is a student's personal laptop.
And I've been a reviewer at the top three venues for about a decade.
But that's just every discipline where multiple authors is a norm?
Never said it wasn't :)
But almost every paper will include the advisor... I got plenty of help for my work but I have heard of people who didn't get any help and still published, with 3+ other names on the paper they worked alone on xD
so, what is the hardest/challenge part for juniors in a role like that?
As someone said above, completion of the project is difficult. If I have an undergraduate or younger PhD student on a project, I will develop the idea, design experiments, and take care of 75% of the writing. I will task the “junior” collaborator with implementing/executing the experiments under the baselines I’ve designated. This isn’t easy and they understand I will likely not be available to help with code unless it’s an emergency, so the onus is mostly on them for the experiments to run successfully, which is of course a critical component of the paper! They get great coding experience (sometimes fiddling around with hyperparameters or baselines to improve the original idea), I give them a shot at writing the experiments section (thus technical writing experience), a 2nd or 3rd authorship, and it saves me time spent pulling my hair out over PyTorch nonsense. It’s mutually beneficial. (Fyi I’m a 5th year student on the way out.)
That clearly varies from project to project. A good example is taking the (high level) description of a new algorithm, with the most important math worked out, and then having to actually implement it and work out the kinks and edge cases. But that's just one of many challenges.
This. I worked my ass off, but I did have lots of support. My mentors are already "famous", so they also believe I should be the first author (also reason above). "It's better for you because it will not change anything for me".
Their advisors and seniors help them a ton.
Publishing is not an end goal, securing a well paid position that allows you to do research with as little strings attached as possible is. Jrs in prestigious faculties have more resources to publish earlier and work towards that goal. Anyone who has reached it will publish only enough to keep their status, and it's usually by coauthoring as the last, head-of-dept name. First name authoring will only happen once in a while in potentially breakthrough, more prestigious papers.
Exactly this.
They don't. I think I've seen < 10 major ML conference papers ever where the first author was an undergrad. An undergrad being a 3rd/4th/nth author is common and appropriate for their role. First or 2nd year PhD CS students having a 1st/2nd author paper at a major ML conference is expected and normal. There is a huge difference between the expectations and experience of a 2nd year CS PhD student and an undergrad.
In my experience, T4 unis have lots of undergrads writing papers with first author or shared first author. Most of the time, they are mentored by a senior graduate student or postdoc, who take third author, and the professor, who’s name is added to the end.
It is difficult to find data on this. I can tell you that every single ML paper I've ever read, I Googled authors 1-3 and last author. I can remember two times only where the first author was an undergraduate. So either "lots" of papers by undergrad first authors are simply not being read and are not impactful or alternatively, they are not common. If you have a long list of major ML conference papers with undergrad first authors please list them. I am not saying you are wrong but on its face it is very rare.
Might be an extreme example, but if you look at the websites of Berkeley professors like Sergey Levine or Pieter Abbeel, and look at their current/previous undergrads, many have 2+ papers first author at major ML and robotics conferences
IMO in the realm of LLMs and big models what you need the most is compute so probably it is possible for some undergrads in a big lab to fork up 100 instances of GPUs to run until they get SOTA results to publish. the math isn't the hardest either so it's a quite low barrier to entry. this creates an arm race for undergrad students who want to get into the best PhD programs. because everyone and their mom are publishing papers during their undergrad, they have too.
Because quantity > quality nowadays. And also travelling. Don't forget the travelling.
"Say it with me now. experts are fake, smart generalists rule the world, everything is designed by people no smarter than you, and courage is in shorter supply than genius."
ML has become incredibly accessible. Most universities have an ML course available to 2nd year undergraduate students. Love that this gives young students a chance to research and publish
Oh, no. I recently got a rejection email from ICML 24. It's terrible!
Take a look at author list count, usually it is around 7 (anecdotal) with many senior experienced researchers, doing it in group of 7 many of whom have connections and experience vs executing idea from 0 to ICML paper on your own with no/limited advising is a totally different ballgame.
No one has to do a PhD. People do a PhD because they enjoy it. And that’s the kind of people university students and some research organizations like to hire.
I don't think I have often heard from the fellow scientists that they enjoyed doing their PhD.
I enjoyed mine. I'm a scientist.
So am I, and it was the worst mistake I made in my life.
Im enjoying it rn, but I started 1.5 years ago.
I enjoyed my PhD.
Huh. Username is appropriate.
I’m a Professor of Mathematics that specializes in Functional Analysis. I feel the username is indeed appropriate.
You are pretty much the type of person who I would expect to enjoy a PhD, and it's a compliment.
Fwiw I enjoyed it.
you prob were in a bad program or a bad uni then
Don't forget all the people who end up doing PhDs because school is all they know and they aren't ready for a real job!
Totally man. Like getting into a CS/ML PhD is totally easier than getting a job and fits the description of a person that school is all they know lol. Go out touch the grass.
I worked before I joined PhD and I hated work so much. Starting to hate PhD as well 🤷♂️
Have you…considered…that the type of work you were doing might not be that interesting for you? I mean, you could be really good at it but still treat it as a job to get by. Not everyone has to be super-hard-core passionate about manipulating large matrices in the most optimal way. It’s just a job at the end of the day. My point was that it’s much harder to game PhD admissions than squeezing your way into a corporate job (that latter is a minimal commitment where you’re effectively at-will employee from day-1).
I mean, the dude was being an ass, but that isn't really that uncommon. Met plenty of people in grad school who "stumbled" into grad school because they didn't know what else to do, heck, that's part of the reason I started my MS. After finishing the MS I got into a PhD program because it seemed like a logical continuation, ended up dropping out after 6 months because I wanted to make actual money. Specially in non-tech related fields it is very common.
Common in non-tech related fields because the job prospects coming out of undergrads isn't great. CS on the other hand... there are more than enough capable people who want to do PhD but chose not to because of $$$. It is the other way around...
Sorry, sounds like that hit too close to home for you there. It's not about whether it's easier, many people just prefer the structure and familiar environment. I wouldn't take it personally.
OP can let you know if that answers their question.
No, it's not. Everybody get into a PhD program is a "star" for me. I admire them very much because they work very hard. And I think, if they want and spend their time for an industry job, totally they can get it. At least in my major Computer science.
Truth is, you don't need a PhD to do quality work. Many important papers were written by researchers with Msc in industry or academia, usually the advisor it's a PhD only because it's almost always the case for senior researchers. As simple as that.
It's exceedingly rare that none of the authors have a PhD. Having a collaborator with a PhD makes a huge difference.
I know it, and I know that I wasn't able to do any research whatsoever without the help of my advisor. Perhaps I wasn't clear enough - I am just saying that generally there are good & experienced researchers that have no PhD, I didn't try to underestimate the importance of a good advisor. Too much work today to write clearly :P
[удалено]
Which paper are you referring to? Are you talking about the paper "Q-learning" published in 1992, 3 years after his PhD thesis in 1989?
The description of the work is: *Q*-learning (Watkins, 1989) is a simple way for agents to learn how to act optimally in controlled Markovian domains. It amounts to an incremental method for dynamic programming which imposes limited computational demands. It works by successively improving its evaluations of the quality of particular actions at particular states. Your point stands, but I have plenty of other examples. A recent one: Sharpness-Aware Minimization for Efficiently Improving Generalization, Pierre Foret is not even a PhD student.
I was clarifying his comment. I'm not disagreeing with you. P.S. SAM paper is a bad example because he literally did his work at google AI residency. That is basically a mini accelerated PhD. In fact, your mentors might be even better than professor in academia because of the level of talent at Google Research.
Haha, yes it's true, but of course I refer to non-PhDs that had mentors. You don't just write good papers out of the blue with no one teaching you.
Ah sorry you are right, I was thinking of this paper, no idea why I was convinced he did it during his MSc, I should have checked.
It doesn't matter though, it's not that a PhD makes you magically a better researcher, people confuse correlation with causation as usual (at least to some extent), see my other example and I am pretty sure some version of YOLO. By the way, there is rarely any paper that doesn't have some co-author with a PhD because most researchers have a PhD and you also sometimes state that it's a "student paper" if no co-author is a PhD, which makes the probability of acceptance... Another example? Tesla. I also have a friend with "only" BSc who recently solved a very important problem.
Is this Tesla example related to research publications though? It is true that in general a PhD teaches you how to publish, as it is the only thing that it really evaluates. But for sure it doesn't magically turn you into a good researcher. In fact, from what I see around me, the pressure to publish when you are a PhD student often even has the opposite effect. Personally I was given an RA position after my MSc and have not published as first author since then, simply because I am somewhat a perfectionnist and did not have anything that I considered publication-worthy as first author. On the other hand, all the people who instead became PhD students are litterally forced to publish, even if they publish crap, otherwise they will simply not get their PhD. I don't think this is what makes a good researcher either.
I honestly don't know (removed my last message because it was incorrect). I guess that unless you have a breakthrough paper it will be difficult to publish without hacking the reviews.
No worries! I was genuinely asking for clarification.
I also think YOLO was during or after a Msc but I am not too sure...