Learnings From NeurIPS

My first presentation at NeurIPS workshop :)

Now that NeurIPS is completed (which is my first in-person conference), here are some of the learnings that I felt to pen-down. The purpose of this document is:

• To reflect upon this experience after few years
• To set some expectations for future conferences (for myself and others who are in the same boat)

A bit of background — “I am a Masters student doing research in NLP and Vision broadly. I’ve been in the ML field for ~4 years and I consider myself as a newbie researcher!”

I believe my readers can be roughly categorized as -

• Experienced folks (top in their field) who are either professors or people who are in research industry for quite sometime
• Experienced PhD
• Early PhD/Masters — Might have 1–2 publications but still exploring!
• No prior publication in these conferences but wanted to gain exposure

This post might not be super relevant to 1,2 because they might already know what to expect and have clear idea. For those folks, incase you are reading this and have any recommendations or different thoughts, please do share. Happy to learn and improve 🙂

So, this year, NeurIPS is a 7 day event with

• 2 day for tutorials — Experienced folks give presentation on selected topics in their domain
• 3 days of Main Conference — Subdivided into posters and Orals
• 2 days of Workshops — Mix of invited talks and posters

Below is a screenshot of the overall schedule to get an idea of how it looks!

I don’t want to daunt anyone but this is how it the schedule roughly looks like!

Key Takeaways:

Don’t fall into the trap of FOMO — Every single day, there will be multiple events which are of your research interest that will be happening in parallel. You have to narrow it down or else you end up not attending/learning anything. You are bound to miss few things and it’s ok!

• For tutorials, workshops and orals — Every night, I spend around 30min, go through the schedule for the next day and filter the selected ones I wanted to attend.
• For posters — (Not the optimal way) I walk fast, skim the poster and understand if it’s a relevant one. If it is, I will stop and talk to author. If not, will go ahead with next poster. If there’s huge crowd, I will take a picture and try to get high-level idea.

I heard from experienced folks that with practice, one can just glance and understand whether a poster is relevant to them or not, so all it takes is time and practice to reach that level.

• Tips for filtering posters — A lot of authors promote their posters in Twitter. So, bookmark the locations to make your life easier. But this is only possible if you have clear idea on which areas you are working on and looking for (which is not the case for a lot of folks including me!)
• A general thumb rule — A lot of crew around a poster and/or spotlight implies that it’s interesting. But I’ve also personally found papers which has no crew and/or spotlight but are very interesting/intuitive!
• NeurIPS is more interdisciplinary, so it’s very difficult to find out and filter. So, don’t set your expectations too high.

Overwhelming is a real issue — When there’s a lot going on every single day, one will be overwhelmed with lot of information so easily. Personally, I was super excited and organized in my schedule the first two days (went to an extent where I didn’t eat properly as I will miss a session) but I quickly got burned out! So, take care of yourself as it’s not a sprint but a marathon.

Also, most of it is recorded, so if you really care about learning, you can learn at your own pace and reach out to authors later on.

Staggering amounts of papers submitted and accepted at NeurIPS 2023!

You might not understand 99.99% of the papers and that’s ok! — Given the huge amount of accepted papers in broad fields, I can imagine only 2 cases if someone can understand a given paper (where the authors have worked on it for about ~1year on average) in 5–10 minutes:

• You have prior experience in the field.
• The paper is too simple to understand — Then it won’t be in NeurIPS in the first place

So, don’t sweat yourself too much! Atleast I was super scared after my first day of Main conference as I can’t understand more than 5 papers! I believe it happens to anyone, so don’t be hard on yourself!

Note: The poster presentation can be great, in which case you will get the key takeaways not the entire underlying concept.

Attend Panel discussions, talks— They are good to gain various perspectives on a topic from experts in the field. It was good and I learned quite few things.

Don’t be afraid to reach out to people — Almost everyone I met was super friendly, humble and quite supportive. You just need to go and introduce yourself. I consider myself as an introvert, still I managed to meet quite a handful of people. Take the first step and just reach out! It’s true you will be exhausted after meeting a bunch of people, but it’s still worth giving a shot.

Attend events/parties — A lot of companies host invite-only parties and it’s a great way to connect to people. I had opportunity to talk and gain insights. But I personally can’t handle too much of party hopping, so after a point, I just relaxed at room in the evenings.

Nano TLDR: Basically, NeurIPS has a lot to offer, it just depends on how much you can take!

Thanks, incase you are still reading this and are currently hiring, I am looking for full-times starting May 2024. Please reach out to me via

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/namburi-gnvv-satya-sai-srinath/

Email: sgnamburi@wisc.edu

Twitter: https://twitter.com/srinath_namburi

Relevant blogs

1. Interaction with Jeff Dean — https://namburisrinath.medium.com/neurips-experience-interaction-with-jeff-dean-60f18403e0b7
2. Interaction with Yann and Jay Alammar — https://namburisrinath.medium.com/interactions-at-neurips-yann-lecun-and-jay-alammar-220e58dfc49f