^ See https://xkcd.com/2456/

In this assignment, you will select a research paper related to NLP and/or DL and provide an easy-to-digest summary (see the README in this repo for details on how to modify this site).

As part of this assignment, you will select an open source/open weight LLM to assist with this task. One LLM model suggestion is SmolLM3 3B and the Open WebUI, Jan UI, (or huggingchat; see also this post about tools for HuggingChat), or a multimodal VLM such as SmolVLM2-2.2B-Instruct.

In addition to answering the provided questions and including the prompts you used for each, you will also be expected to describe your experience using your selected LLM and identify limitations or errors that it produced.

• rubrics

Questions

Here are some questions your summary should answer:

• what are the authors proposing?
• what is the motivation for the work?
• what is the approach or innovation?
• what are the results and how do they compare with competing approaches?
  • is the comparison fair?
• what are the takeaways according to the authors?
• what are the takeaways according to you?
• Would you use this? If so, how/where would you use this?
• what problems remain and what are the next steps?

Where to look for papers

Here are few resources to peruse when looking for a paper

• https://aclanthology.org
• That site formerly known as Twitter
• Semantic Scholar
  • search for a topic, sort by Date/Most Influential/etc
• ArXiv cs.CL
  • alternative interface: https://arxiv-sanity-lite.com/
• /r/machinelearning

Tips

When you first start reading research papers, it can be quite an intimidating process full of strange symbols and acronyms. You may not have a deep familiarity of prior work on the topic, so some sections of the paper may not be immediately accessible.

Andrew Ng has some great tips on how to read a research paper (see 6:30-13:52):

TL;DWatch

Don't just read the paper from beginning to end. Instead, he recommends "reading" the paper in multiple passes:

• Pass 1: title + abstract + figures and captions
• Pass 2: Careful read of abstract, intro, and conclusions
  • review figures and captions
  • skim the rest (feel free to skip the Related Work section at this stage)
• Pass 3: Read the paper, but skip the math (at least for now)
• Pass 4: Read the whole thing, but skip parts that don't make sense (at least for now)

Additional tips

• If you have a tablet, scribble your notes on the paper as you go (star key areas, circle points of confusion, and add notes to the margins)
  • If you don't have a tablet, consider printing out the paper, so that you can take notes in context as you read

Examples of summaries

Attention is all you need [1]