Paper gestaltHow to make your paper looks “good”

Number of submissions increase every year

• This year, CVPR has > 1600 submissions !

A lot of works for reviewers

• The number of papers I have reviewed in the last year :– Conference:

• CVPR, ECCV, ACCV, WACV, PSIVT, Eurographics, Siggraph Asia

– Journal:• PAMI, IJCV, TIP, TVCG, CVA, CVIU, PR, etc

• In total, I reviewed around 50 papers in the last year…

• Some papers are good, some papers are bad• How do I know which one is good quickly ?

First Glance

• Without reading any contents, I read the lay-out and results

• After that, I read the abstract, then I have rough idea about the quality of the paper

• The time I spent on reviewing one paper depends on my first impression about the “quality”

Statistical analysis about the project layout

• Some guys (Carven von Bearnensquash, a fake name) built a classifier to test this “Theory”

• Without reading any contents, just use the pdf image to train the adaboost classifier

• Positive Examples: Papers accepted in CVPR08, ICCV09, CVPR09

• Negative Examples: Workshop papers from the same conference……

Find out

• Without reading the paper contents, the classifier has 88.4% accuracy !!!

• It seems that there are some common “trend” about good papers versus bad papers

Common characteristics of good papers

Common characteristics of bad papers

So…

• There are actually common “template” about a good paper

• Technical contributions and novelties are important, good writing and presentation skills are also important !

• There is no guarantee that your submitted papers will be accepted, but there is some “guarantee” that your papers won’t receive a score “Definitely Reject”

How to start your writing

• First, keep in mind, writing paper is not putting your program into the papers– We are not submitting programs

• Find out your contributions and Focus your writing on the contributions !

• Be careful about the balance of each sections and components.

It is always good to have an abstract

• It is always a good idea to first writing the abstract– Abstract is more than the summary of your paper– You need to think of your contributions and write

them into the abstract– Abstract usually take 1-2 paragraphs, it’s short– After you have abstract, your writing will be more

focus

Write your section title even it’s empty

• After the abstract, decide which contents are going to be included.

• The section title defines the organization of your papers

• Write the section title, give a name to the section and subsections

Now, time to write the technical contents

• Write the technical contents– Step-by-step

• Put more words on main technical contributions• Less words on pre-processing / post-processing

– Be careful about the symbols• 1 symbol should only have 1 meaning inside your whole paper

– You don’t need to include all equations into your paper• Make a balances, 6-10 equations are good number• Give citations to the equations if they are not originally from you

– Use Figures to illustrate complicated concept• Figures tell more than texts; they are easier to understand• The figures high-light your technical contributions

Writing your Result section

• Again, even you don’t have any result, put an “empty box” over there, it will help you to balance the paper writing and estimate the length of your paper.

• Focus your experiments on the results that are going to be included in your paper– It is waste of time if you do an experiment but the results are not

included– Select examples such that each example tells something different– Think of different situations and/or criticisms that can be arose

by reviewers– It is always good to have 1 failure example

Discussions and conclusions

• Usually, it is just a repeat about your contribution, and gives reason why this paper should be accepted

• If your paper has assumptions, this is a good place to discuss those assumptions

• Future works do not “mean” they are your future works– But it is more promising if they are really your

future works

Reminder

• Always proof read the grammar and typos• Do not afraid of poor writing, a poor writing

after 10 times revision, the writing become good• Always open mind to accept criticisms from your

peers– It is much better than receiving the criticisms from

reviewers• Improve the quality of your paper until the last

minutes

That’s all

When you start writing your first papers, come back to these slides,

they will definitely help