I started my PhD in NLP a year or so before the advent of Transformers, and finished it just as ChatGPT was unveiled (literally defended a week before). Halfway through, I felt the sudden acceleration of NLP, where there was so much everywhere all at once. Before, knowing one’s domain, and the state-of-the-art GCN, CNN or Bert architectures, was enough.
Since, I’ve been working in a semi-related area (computer assisted humanities) as a data engineer/software developer/ML engineer (it’s a small team so many hats). Not much in terms of latest news, so I tried recently to get up to speed with the recent developments.
But there are so many ! Everywhere. Even just in NLP, not considering all the other fields such as reinforcement learning, computer vision, all the fundamentals of ML etc. It is damn near impossible to gather an in-depth understanding of a model as they are so complex, and numerous. All of them are built on top of other ones, so you also need to read up on those to understand anything. I follow some people on LinkedIn who just give new names every week or so. Going to look for papers in top conferences is also daunting as there is no guarantee that a paper with an award will translate to an actual system, while companies churn out new architectures without the research paper/methodology being made public. It’s overwhelming.
So I guess my question is two fold : how does one get up to speed after a year of not being too much in the field ? And how does one keep up after that ?
My tactic is to start by checking the papers that actually GET IN to major conferences (Neurips, ICLR, ICML are a good start). This narrows the search considerably. Doing a Google scholar search, for example, will just yield an insurmountable number of papers. This is, in part, due to the standard “make public before it is accepted” methodology (arXiV preprints are fantastic but they also increase the noise level dramatically).
Now, having been burnt by the chaos of the review processes of the aforementioned conferences, I am certainly aware that their publications are by no means the “Gold standard” but the notion of peer review, including the intended outcomes of improvement therethrough, is powerful nonetheless.
That helps narrow it down. Though, many discoveries are not published anymore. Reminds me of Mikolov, who was rejected pretty much everywhere and word vectors ended up being such a big deal. Or that OpenAI does not publish their models.