Guideline & Policy for Paper Presentation

Two or more students will be randomly assigned as a team to read one of the papers in the list and present it. Through the term, each student will have the chance to present one paper. The detailed schedule will be released on Piazza and Canvas.

Paper Reading

Before reading the paper, I strongly recommend you read this essay on how to read papers and even the references therein. You could imagine yourself being the reviewer of this paper. If you have never done review before, you can find some examples here and more from OpenReview. For example, you can see the public review comments after clicking any paper in ICLR 2026. Of course, since not all reviewers are doing a great job, you should do some filtering and learn from good ones.

Slides (50%)

Each team should make one deck of slides (must have 25+ pages) and submit it on Canvas 1 day before the presentation day. You can choose whatever formats or templates. Powerpoint or LaTex (Beamer) are preferred.

Slides should roughly contain the following parts:

  1. Problem Setup and Motivation (20%)
    • Explain what the problem this paper resolves and why it is an important problem. and the main (both technical and empirical) contributions.
  2. Contributions (50%)
    • Summarize the main (both technical and empirical) contributions.
    • Delve deep into the technical contributions (e.g., methodology, implementation, theoretical results, and so on). You do not need to go over all details like proofs (proof sketch is welcome if time permits) and implementation details (better put some in the backup slides).
    • Explain the experimental setup, results, and analysis.
  3. Take-home messages and additional comments (30%)
    • Describe the strength and the weakness. Typical criteria include: soundness of the claims (theoretical grounding, empirical evaluation), significance and novelty of the contribution, and clarity of the writing.
    • Summarize important things that you learned.
    • Raise questions you have.
    • Propose suggestions about how to improve the work.
  4. (Optional) Backup slides for answering questions from the professor and other students.

You can use LLms and or online materials like pictures, animation, and so on. But please make sure you give credits clearly.

Presentation (50%)

Each team will have 40mins for presentation where roughly 30mins for presenting and 10mins for QAs.

  1. Presentation (50%)
    • You should practice the presentation to make it smooth.
    • The presentation time should evenly distributed across presenters.
  2. QAs (50%)
    • Be prepared to answer questions from the professor and other students. Better to use backup slides if the answers are expected to be hard to describe.