4.4 KiB
4.4 KiB
Experiments Writing Guide
Goal
Convince reviewers with complete evidence on effectiveness, causality, and practical value.
Three Core Questions
- Is the method better than strong baselines?
- Run comparison experiments against strong and recent baselines.
- Report standard metrics on the main benchmark(s).
- Include SOTA or strongest public methods, not only weak baselines.
- Keep protocol fair (same data split, preprocessing, and evaluation settings).
- Which modules/design choices make the gain?
- Run ablation studies for each key module/design choice.
- Use remove/replace/disable variants and report delta to full model.
- Include component interaction ablations when modules are coupled.
- How far can the method generalize under harder settings?
- Run demos/evaluations on harder or out-of-distribution settings.
- Add stress-test scenarios (more complex scenes, rarer cases, noisier inputs, or stricter constraints).
- Report both gains and failure modes to show realistic boundaries.
Experiment Planning
flowchart TB
A["Key Paper Claims"] --> B["What Contributions Are Claimed?"]
B --> C1["Contribution 1"]
B --> C2["Contribution 2"]
B --> C3["Contribution 3"]
C1 --> D1["Validation Experiment 1"]
C2 --> D2["Validation Experiment 2"]
C3 --> D3["Validation Experiment 3"]
E["Method Pipeline Figure"] --> F["What Modules and Parameters Matter?"]
F --> G1["Technical Module 1"]
F --> G2["Technical Module 2"]
F --> G3["Key Parameter 1"]
F --> G4["Key Parameter 2"]
G1 --> H1["Ablation Study 1"]
G2 --> H2["Ablation Study 2"]
G3 --> H3["Ablation Study 3"]
G4 --> H4["Ablation Study 4"]
Experiment Section Decomposition
flowchart TB
S1["Experimental Setup"] --> S2["Validation Experiment 1"]
S2 --> S3["Validation Experiment 2"]
S3 --> S4["Ablation Studies"]
Figure/Table Writing Rules
Good tables are part of experiment communication quality, not decoration.
- Figure captions and table captions are equally important in the writing quality of Experiments.
Hard rules
- Put caption above the table.
- Avoid vertical lines (
|) in tabular columns. - Do not use double rules or dense
\hlinestacks. - Use
booktabsstyle (\toprule,\midrule,\bottomrule) for clean structure. - Use as few horizontal rules as possible; lines should separate groups, not every row.
- Highlight key numbers (best/second-best or target rows) with subtle color emphasis.
Readability rules from review practice
- Label metric direction in column headers (for example
PSNR ↑,LPIPS ↓). - Add units when needed so values are interpretable without guessing.
- Align text columns left; keep numeric columns consistently aligned.
- Keep numeric precision consistent (same decimal places within a metric column).
- Group multi-dataset or multi-setting results using
\multicolumn+\cmidrule, not vertical separators. - One table, one message: do not mix unrelated results in a single table.
- If rows represent different attributes/ablations, encode that explicitly in row names or attribute columns.
- Keep caption focused on setting/protocol/notation, not long discussion.
- If there is little detail to explain, use one concise sentence to summarize the main result.
- For single-column figures/tables in two-column papers, prefer placing them in the right column when layout allows, so readers can enter the page from the left-top text without breaking reading flow.
Minimal LaTeX checklist
- Add packages in preamble:
\usepackage{booktabs},\usepackage{colortbl,xcolor}(and optionally\usepackage{siunitx}for decimal alignment). - Replace
\hline-heavy style with\toprule/\midrule/\bottomrule. - Put
\caption{...}before\label{...}and keep caption above. - Use restrained highlighting; never color too many cells.
Recommended Ablation Package
- One core ablation table for all major contributions.
- Several focused mini-ablations for module-level design choices.
- Matching qualitative visual results for each important ablation.
Experimental Rigor Checklist
- Are baselines recent and relevant?
- Are metrics sufficient and standard for this task?
- Is ablation tied to every key design claim?
- Are claims in Abstract/Introduction supported by reported numbers?
- Are limitations of evaluation scope explicitly stated?