from Guide to the PhD on Oct 23, 2022

What defines a "good" researcher?

What makes the "ideal researcher"? No one knows, and what's worse: Without knowing your goal, you won't know what to work on. 5 years ago, this confusion stagnated my research career; let me save you from that.

At the start of my research career, I had no idea what kind of qualities a top-talent researcher possessed, much less how to get there. This did manifest itself in important ways: I was unable to pivot from dysfunctional ideas, results took longer or were never obtained, I got easily overwhelmed by lack of progress.. the list goes on. It's honestly a crappy place to be, and the best way to summarize it is: I sucked at research. Funnily enough, as rock-bottom as any given day felt, the next day was even worse: Now, there were n+1 days without research "progress" — whatever "progress" meant.

Today, I can confidently say that I suck less at research, by simply knowing what kind of researcher I need to be. To do this, I amassed a list of ideal-researcher qualities by observing ideal researchers — the many mentors spanning industry and academia, Bichen, Richard, Lane, my former adviser Joey, and many many more. These are researchers that produce results weekly if not daily, but despite their superhuman productivity, they sleep 8 hours a day just like the rest of us mortals.

To save you from the years of confusion, I'll cover 3 qualities of top researchers1, so you know what qualities you need to start building. These are my own opinions, and opinions will differ from researcher to researcher. However, just knowing these criteria has given me significant peace of mind; when a paper goes well (or not), I can point to these qualities and identify what went wrong, or what went right. The next paper deadline is then a chance to try again. These are guidelines I wish I had when I started my research career, and I hope they'll serve you well, either as guidelines or as ideas for your own.

Find important but easy problems.

What are the most important questions in your field? Of those, which are easy to tackle? And why aren't you tackling those problems? 90% of research is finding the right problem to work on. You could work hard and fast but in the wrong direction: This leads to burnout and disappointment. Take the extra time to really hone in on the right problem. Note this focus on the problem is an oft-repeated saying and not wisdom I'm sharing for the first time. Despite that, this isn't iterated enough.

Here's an easy litmus test: When you introduce what you're working, do you start with the problem, or the solution? If the latter, really rethink whether your solution is guided by a well-defined problem. The key to impactful research is the problem itself, and often times, a paper introducing a new problem can become wildly impactful despite a mediocre method. When outlining a research agenda, there are 3 tips to keep in mind for your problem statement:

  1. Know the problem. The obvious but necessary tip is to know what the problem statement even is. Can you summarize it to a peer in 30 seconds or less? Ensure the problem statement is crisp in your head and possible to communicate. If you can't communicate it, it's likely not clear enough.
  2. Pick an important problem. The problem should have clear applicability. Note that problem statements early in your research career don't have to be widely applicable. However, the application should be clear nonetheless. For example, say you're tackling a specific failure of image classifiers. Explain why this particular error is worthwhile to solve: perhaps it's directly related to a particular misclassification of cancerous tumors.
  3. Pick an "easy" problem. Pick a problem that you believe will be easy to tackle, or at least, a problem you very confidently believe can be tackled. The best problems to work on — or specifically, the best solutions to work on — are ones that you believe in 100%. Then, either it works and your assumptions are validated, or it fails, and you learn something new. Note this notion of "easy" is specifically from your standpoint, so the problem itself may be difficult. However, with your particular skillset or insight, the problem suddenly becomes easy.

Taking altogether, these 3 tips culminate in a pretty obvious tip: Work on easy but important problems. This means picking significant, low-hanging fruits. However, note that missing one or the other is a mistake: Tackling insignificant, low-hanging fruits gets you nowhere. Likewise, tackling an important but unsolvable task will likewise stump you. Yet, there are plenty of examples of papers that miss the mark:

Work on easy but important problems. This means picking significant, low-hanging fruits.

When you're just starting and brainstorming for a new project, consider this process:

  1. Start naive. Ask yourself: "What is easy and important?" You can avoid existing works to start. Pick a problem domain that interests you. If you're later in your PhD, you may already know which general domain interests you: Pick a problem within that domain that you believe solves one of the most important problems in that domain. This initial ignorance is important to have. It lets you brainstorm constraint-free. Ask crazy questions, and put down nutty ideas. What's funny is, Joey would often do this in our 1-on-1 meetings. Every single time, I would (a) shoot down his idea in the meeting and then (b) realize a week later that his story was a very interesting take on the problem. If you're in a PhD program, your adviser can hopefully do the same — provide you with the right stories and perspectives. The same goes for your mentor, senior engineers, senior researchers — anyone with a 30,000-foot perspective.
  2. Perform a thorough literature review. Present your ideas. After your blissful state of ignorance, return to reality and start looking up key terms. See what related works there are in object detection, depth estimation, whatever your topic is. Note that it's not usually possible for a problem statement to be scooped; more often, it's methods that can be scooped. As a result, even if you find highly-relevant papers, don't despair. If anything, (a) it means that your knack for problems is validated by other researchers and (b) you now have papers to pick at, instead of starting from ground zero. At the same time, present your problem statement to other researchers. Others may have ideas or have heard about related works. This is generally how research collaborations start — when multiple parties share an interest in the same problems.

With these two phases done, you should then move on to failing fast. Surprisingly, there exists a way to constantly make research progress, in the face of uncertainty.

Make constant research progress by failing fast.

Here's a hypothetical but common scenario: We have a hunch some portion of previous methods is "wrong" — the loss, the architecture, etc. In light of this, we formulate a solution, code it up, and try it. The first iteration doesn't work, so we brainstorm 3 ideas and try them all. Unfortunately, after trying all 3 ideas, you still have not improved over the baseline. For now, you're still optimistic, so you talk to more people and solicit 5 more ideas. You again try them all, again to no avail. This continues, with you trying new ideas and soliciting new ideas. Eventually, you'll run out of ideas, steam, and compute credits. We're all familiar with this — by the end, you're burnt out and results-less.

The root cause? You never tested your hunch, the core hypothesis that previous methods are "wrong" in a particular way. In many cases, it turns out this hunch was wrong, and the problem never existed to begin with. Then, in retrospect, you often realize "Of course no solution for this nonexistent problem would help."

In retrospect, you often realize "Of course no solution for this nonexistent problem would help."

To address this, we need to fail fast, thus the title for this section. This means optimizing for disproving assumptions, to help us narrow in on the version of our hypothesis that's correct. This process is like traversing a large binary tree, where the faster we can traverse this tree, the more quickly we can make research progress. To traverse this binary tree, we need 3 steps:

  1. You need to know what each fork in the road is, what binary decision you're trying to make. Always ask yourself: "What is my hypothesis actually?" You must know what question you're really asking, and this usually means digging into your thoughts to identify the assumption you're making, that needs testing. The hypothesis should not be "Method X will improve accuracy". That's not a(n interesting) hypothesis. If this is your hypothesis, ask yourself: Why should method X improve accuracy? These hypotheses should be ones you believe in firmly. It should be obvious that they're true, to you at least.
  2. One natural knee jerk response is: Most questions are open ended. Why is this tree binary? The reality is, most questions should be reduced to binary, for it to be more clearly and definitively answerable. In this case, your binary decision should be "Is my hypothesis true?". The most challenging step is the previous step, recognizing what your hypothesis actually is.
  3. Third, fail the hypothesis quickly. This is the reason for this section's title: Fail fast. This is what my adviser likes to say, and this particular tip has been a big boon for my research productivity. Rather than trying to prove the idea, it's often worthwhile to run several quick sanity checks that aim to fail the hypothesis. If you can fail fast, you can eliminate branches of the tree quickly, and move forward.

Example Fail-fast for Cutmix

Let's say we hypothesize "Adding cutmix 2 regularization will improve accuracy". As we said before, this is an uninteresting hypothesis, mostly because failure doesn't teach us anything.

Here is thought process you should follow, to improve this hypothesis.

Here's why this process is important: If we test cutmix blindly, we don't know if the failure was due to a bug, a misconception, or if our hypothesis about confusing samples is true. However, by running this sanity check: we now have a surefire reason to believe cutmix should work. If cutmix fails, we can more confidently say that there was a bug in our implementation.

Digging down even further, we may also find an even quicker fail-fast experiment. Rather than ask about cutmix in particular, we can question the need for regularization.

In summary, your goal is to fail fast. To do this, make sure to step back every so often and ask: What is my actual hypothesis? What is the fastest way to test that hypothesis? Conducting research involves traversing a binary tree of decisions, and you should eliminate wrong paths as quickly as possibly, by designing the right sanity checks.

Tell tried and true stories.

On a very broad level, a significant portion of research is also about selling your work3. At the most technical level, it means your paper must tell a convincing story: illustrate a massive, insurmountable problem; provide the insight you had that no one else did; then show an elegant, simple, easy-to-adopt method that capitalizes on the insight.

There are 2 components to a good story. Any of these components, or maybe all of them, is what others refer to, when they say a "good story":

  1. Illustrate a massive, insurmountable problem: Illustrate a problem that is exceptionally difficult to solve. As my undergraduate adviser Kurt liked to say: "Illustrate the big bad dragon before you slay it". This is the most important part of the story.

    • This appears to contradict our previous tip: We elaborated on the criteria for a real problem, in "Find real problems," where I advised picking an "easy" and important problem. "Easy" is from your perspective, but when sharing your story, it's the reverse: Convince your reader that the problem is exceptionally difficult. This doesn't mean falsifying information. It means highlighting all of the technical hurdles you had to face, in your pursuit of a solution. It also means possibly highlighting all previous attempts from other works to tackle this problem. Even better, it may mean highlighting a dearth of works that tackle this problem. In the end, when telling your story, highlight its difficulty and importance. We also discussed more examples of telling the problem statement in "How to write your personal statement, for PhD admissions".
    • One of my favorite ways of illustrating a problem is by illustrating a dichotomy. For example, in a 2021 ICLR paper titled "Neural Backed Decision Trees", I wrote that previous methods either "(1) sacrifice interpretability to maintain accuracy or (2) sacrifice accuracy to maintain interpretability". Our method then improved accuracy and interpretability. I did the same in a 2022 CVPR paper titled "FBNetV2": Either (1) benefit from a large search space but with significant computational cost or (2) restrict your search space but save on computational cost. We again broke the dichotomy by increasing search space size by many orders of magnitude but keeping computational cost constant.
  2. Share the insight everyone else missed: Identify the one key idea that all previous works missed. Perhaps all previous papers missed a part of the problem — a difficult but common scenario that occurs in the dataset. Or, perhaps all previous works missed a part of the method — a small but effective tweak that significantly improves performance. Your insight should allow you to introduce your method like this: "Using this insight, we …". This insight is sometimes omitted even from great papers, which substitute insight with a slew of very impressive results. This is the exception, not the rule, for great papers. The results should be so convincing that the research community is willing to take the effort to draw their own insights. In telling your story, including the insight increases the odds that the method and results stick.

The components above are the most critical. Here are some other tips and considerations when crafting your story. These are less critical but can certainly help with an effective story:

In summary, your goal is to share a compelling story: share how important and difficult the problem is, the insight that enabled you to solve it easily, and an elegant method that's easy to adopt. Then, practice this everywhere and tell it to everyone — even and especially if it's not well-formed.

Example Story for Occluded Objects

You'll need both importance and difficulty to make for a convincing problem that draws widespread interest. Note this is true even if you're working in a well-established problem space, like object detection for self-driving for example.

With these 3 pieces of the story thought out, your next mission is to pitch it to all sorts of people. Through pitching it to others, you should hopefully encounter resistance and some interesting questions. Here are a few examples of questions others may raise:

If you're now embarking on a paper deadline, make sure to first read Is my project paper-ready?

Hone these research qualities everyday.

With the qualities outlined above, you now know what your target is, as a researcher. However, the next natural question is: How do I improve these research qualities in myself? The tips above lend themselves to daily practice, which you can start employing immediately.

If you find yourself enjoying the process of honing these research qualities, then a PhD could be up your alley. Consider reasons to pursue a PhD (and reasons not to) in Why pursue a PhD? Is it for me? .


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  1. These guidelines might generalize to entrepreneurship too. However, my field of expertise is in research, so I'll stick to examples and details in research. 

  2. For some background, cutmix is a regularization technique that involves mixing classes. Say we have a cat and a dog picture. During training, we will crop a cat image and paste it onto a dog image. Our final image is 60% cat and 40% dog. Then, our image class label is updated to be 60% cat and 40% dog. Throughout training, we will change the percentage given to each class — 70%-30%, 80%-20%, etc. Intuitively, this forces our model is better understand when a cat-dog hybrid is more cat-like or more dog-like. Reference: CutMix: Regularization Strategy to Train Strong Classifiers with Localizable Features 

  3. At a level most researchers don't like to admit, this also means you should be able to market your work. However, before thinking about marketing your work, keep in mind marketing acts only as a multiplier: A poorly-written paper with excellent marketing is 0x10=0, and likewise, a well-written paper with poor marketing is 10x0=0. The mixture of both is what makes successful papers and research. We'll focus on just telling the story in your paper, in this post.