Anatomy of an ML Paper

Nearly every ML paper follows the same skeleton:

• Abstract — the 150-word sales pitch: problem, approach, headline result
• Introduction — motivation, the gap in prior work, the claimed contributions
• Related work — which neighborhood of research this paper lives in
• Method — the actual idea, usually one architecture diagram plus math
• Experiments — datasets, baselines, ablations, tables of numbers
• Limitations & conclusion — what the authors admit, or were forced to admit