LaTeX Paper Writing for ML Venues
Venue Formatting Requirements
Decision Table: Venue Selection
| Venue | Style File | Page Limit (Main) | Supplementary | Abstract Limit | Blind Review |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| NeurIPS | neurips_2024.sty | 9 + refs | Unlimited appendix | 250 words | Yes |
| ICML | icml2024.sty | 8 + refs | Unlimited appendix | N/A | Yes |
| ICLR | iclr2024_conference.sty | 8 + refs (soft) | Unlimited appendix | N/A | Yes |
| AAAI | aaai24.sty | 7 + 1 refs + 1 ethics | Separate PDF | N/A | Yes |
| ACL | acl2024.sty | 8 + refs | 4 pages | N/A | Yes (ARR) |
| CVPR | cvpr.sty | 8 + refs | Unlimited | N/A | Yes |
Submission vs Camera-Ready
| Aspect | Submission | Camera-Ready |
|---|---|---|
| Author names | Anonymous | Full names + affiliations |
| Style option | \usepackage[preprint]{neurips_2024} | \usepackage[final]{neurips_2024} |
| Page limit | Strict | Usually +1 page |
| Acknowledgments | Omit | Include |
| Supplementary | Separate or appended | Usually appended |
Paper Preamble Template
latex
\documentclass{article}
% --- Venue style (swap per target) ---
\usepackage[preprint]{neurips_2024}
% --- Core packages ---
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{hyperref}
\usepackage{url}
\usepackage{booktabs} % Professional tables
\usepackage{amsfonts}
\usepackage{amsmath}
\usepackage{amssymb}
\usepackage{mathtools} % dcases, coloneqq
\usepackage{nicefrac}
\usepackage{microtype} % Better typography
\usepackage{xcolor}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage{subcaption} % Subfigures
\usepackage{algorithm}
\usepackage{algorithmic}
\usepackage{pgfplots}
\usepackage{tikz}
\pgfplotsset{compat=1.18}
% --- Math operators ---
\DeclareMathOperator*{\argmin}{arg\,min}
\DeclareMathOperator*{\argmax}{arg\,max}
\DeclareMathOperator{\E}{\mathbb{E}}
\newcommand{\R}{\mathbb{R}}
\newcommand{\loss}{\mathcal{L}}
\newcommand{\dataset}{\mathcal{D}}
\newcommand{\param}{\boldsymbol{\theta}}
\newcommand{\norm}[1]{\left\lVert #1 \right\rVert}
\title{Your Title Here}
\author{Anonymous} % Submission phase
\begin{document}
\maketitle
\begin{abstract}
Your abstract (NeurIPS: max 250 words).
\end{abstract}
Algorithm Environment
latex
\begin{algorithm}[t]
\caption{Stochastic Gradient Descent with Momentum}
\label{alg:sgd-momentum}
\begin{algorithmic}[1]
\REQUIRE Learning rate $\eta$, momentum $\beta$, initial params $\param_0$
\ENSURE Trained parameters $\param_T$
\STATE $\mathbf{v}_0 \leftarrow \mathbf{0}$
\FOR{ = 1$ \TO $}
\STATE Sample mini-batch \sim \dataset$
\STATE $\mathbf{g}_t \leftarrow \nabla_{\param} \loss(\param_{t-1}; B_t)$
\STATE $\mathbf{v}_t \leftarrow \beta \mathbf{v}_{t-1} + \mathbf{g}_t$
\STATE $\param_t \leftarrow \param_{t-1} - \eta \mathbf{v}_t$
\ENDFOR
\RETURN $\param_T$
\end{algorithmic}
\end{algorithm}
Figures
Subfigure Layout
latex
\begin{figure}[t]
\centering
\begin{subfigure}[b]{0.48\textwidth}
\centering
\includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{figures/loss_curve.pdf}
\caption{Training loss}
\label{fig:loss}
\end{subfigure}
\hfill
\begin{subfigure}[b]{0.48\textwidth}
\centering
\includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{figures/accuracy.pdf}
\caption{Validation accuracy}
\label{fig:acc}
\end{subfigure}
\caption{Training dynamics on CIFAR-10. (a) Loss converges within 50 epochs.
(b) Accuracy plateaus at 94.2\%.}
\label{fig:training}
\end{figure}
PGFPlots Inline Chart
latex
\begin{figure}[t]
\centering
\begin{tikzpicture}
\begin{axis}[
width=0.75\columnwidth,
height=5cm,
xlabel={Epoch},
ylabel={Test Accuracy (\%)},
legend pos=south east,
grid=major,
legend style={font=\small},
]
\addplot[blue, thick, mark=none] table[x=epoch, y=ours, col sep=comma]
{data/results.csv};
\addplot[red, dashed, thick, mark=none] table[x=epoch, y=baseline, col sep=comma]
{data/results.csv};
\legend{Ours, Baseline}
\end{axis}
\end{tikzpicture}
\caption{Comparison against baseline on ImageNet.}
\label{fig:comparison}
\end{figure}
Results Tables
latex
\begin{table}[t]
\caption{Results on standard benchmarks. Best in \textbf{bold}, second \underline{underlined}.}
\label{tab:results}
\centering
\small
\begin{tabular}{lcccc}
\toprule
Method & CIFAR-10 & CIFAR-100 & ImageNet & Params (M) \\
\midrule
ResNet-50 & 95.1 & 78.3 & 76.1 & 25.6 \\
ViT-B/16 & 96.2 & 82.1 & 77.9 & 86.4 \\
Baseline & 95.8 & 80.5 & 77.2 & 24.1 \\
\midrule
\textbf{Ours} & \textbf{97.1} & \textbf{84.3} & \underline{78.8} & 26.3 \\
Ours (small) & \underline{96.5} & \underline{83.1} & \textbf{79.2} & 12.8 \\
\bottomrule
\end{tabular}
\end{table}
Bibliography Setup
latex
% In preamble (natbib usually loaded by venue style)
\usepackage[numbers,sort&compress]{natbib}
\bibliographystyle{plainnat}
% At end of document
\bibliography{references}
BibTeX Entry Patterns
bibtex
@inproceedings{vaswani2017attention,
title = {Attention is All You Need},
author = {Vaswani, Ashish and Shazeer, Noam and Parmar, Niki and
Uszkoreit, Jakob and Jones, Llion and Gomez, Aidan N and
Kaiser, {\L}ukasz and Polosukhin, Illia},
booktitle = {Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)},
volume = {30},
year = {2017}
}
@article{devlin2019bert,
title = {{BERT}: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers
for Language Understanding},
author = {Devlin, Jacob and Chang, Ming-Wei and Lee, Kenton and
Toutanova, Kristina},
journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:1810.04805},
year = {2019}
}
Supplementary Material Structure
latex
% After \bibliography{references} in main document
\newpage
\appendix
\section{Proof of Theorem 1}
\label{app:proof}
...
\section{Additional Experiments}
\label{app:experiments}
\section{Hyperparameter Details}
\label{app:hyperparams}
\section{Compute Resources}
\label{app:compute}
Gotchas and Anti-Patterns
Submission Formatting Traps
- •Missing anonymization: grep for author names, institution names, GitHub URLs before submission.
\iclrfinalcopyleft in submission = desk reject. - •Wrong style option:
[final]vs[preprint]flag changes page layout. Always double-check. - •Overflowing margins: venue checkers reject margin violations. Use
\usepackage[letterpaper]{geometry}only if the style file does not set it. - •Font embedding: run
pdffonts output.pdfto verify all fonts embedded. Missing fonts = rejection at some venues.
Page Limit Management
- •Move proofs and ablations to appendix early; do not scramble at deadline.
- •
\vspace{-Xpt}and\setlength{\textfloatsep}{5pt}buy space but look bad if overdone. - •Shrink figures with
width=0.9\columnwidthrather than removing content. - •Use
\smallor\footnotesizein tables, never in body text.
Common Mistakes
- •Using
\citevs\citepvs\citetincorrectly.\citetfor "Author (2024) showed...",\citepfor "(Author, 2024)". - •BibTeX keys with special characters break silently. Stick to
authorYEARword. - •
\labelmust come after\captionin figures/tables, otherwise references break. - •PDF figures > vector (
.pdf/.eps). Raster (.png) only for photographs/screenshots. - •Never
\newpageor\clearpagein submission body to game layout; reviewers notice.