- name
- ai-paper-writing
- description
- Best practices for writing AI research papers. Use when the project involves writing a research paper in AI field.
AI Paper Writing
A modular skill bundle distilled from “Highly Opinionated Advice on How to Write AI Papers” (Neel Nanda). The goal is to help you produce papers where readers understand, remember, and believe the narrative.
North star
An ideal paper is a short, rigorous, evidence-based technical story with a takeaway the reader cares about:
- What? 1–3 concrete claims that contribute to knowledge
- Why? rigorous evidence that supports the claims
- So what? motivation + impact: why the reader should care
How to use
Pick a workflow below, or jump straight to a module. Each module is independent.
Common inputs
- Your paper text (or section)
- Or: a project summary + key results + experiments list
Common outputs
- claim list (1–3 claims + scope + confidence level)
- evidence map (claim → experiments → risks)
- rewritten abstract/intro
- experiment fixes (baselines, ablations, stronger discriminators)
- figure + caption guidance
- limitations + discussion guidance
Workflows
A) Drafting from scratch (recommended order)
- Compress to claims
- Motivation & impact
- Novelty & positioning
- Evidence & red-teaming
- Paper structure overview
- Abstract
- Introduction
- Figures
- Main body layering
- Discussion & limitations
- Related work
B) Reviewing a draft
- Compress to claims (extract what the paper _actually_ claims)
- Evidence & red-teaming
- Avoid misleading evidence
- Abstract
- Introduction
- Common pitfalls
C) Strengthening experiments
D) Tightening narrative + clarity
Templates
Modules index
- 00 Overview
- 01 Compress to claims
- 02 Motivation & impact
- 03 Novelty & positioning
- 04 Evidence & red-teaming
- 05 Experiments design
- 06 Avoid misleading evidence
- 07 Structure: Abstract
- 08 Structure: Introduction
- 09 Figures
- 10 Main body
- 11 Related work
- 12 Discussion & limitations
- 13 Writing process
- 14 Common pitfalls
- 15 Checklists
Acknowledgements
This was compiled from Neel Nanda's article (Highly Opinionated Advice on How to Write AI Papers)[https://www.alignmentforum.org/s/5GT3yoYM9gRmMEKqL/p/eJGptPbbFPZGLpjsp]