Paper Presentations
The goal of a presentation is to prove you understood the paper — not to summarize it. No slide reading; reconstruct the paper in your own words, and be ready to answer questions with the slides off.
Format — fixed for every paper
- 25 minutes per paper: 15-minute talk (hard stop, timer shown) + 8-minute Q&A + 2-minute transition.
- 6 slides maximum. Exceeding the time or slide limit costs points.
- Slide 3 must contain a mechanism figure you drew yourself — pasting the paper’s figure is not allowed.
- After the talk, slides go off: the instructor asks 1–2 cold questions, answered at the whiteboard, and the designated discussant asks one.
The 6-slide template
| # | Slide | Time |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | One-sentence contribution — “This paper solves [problem] with [idea]” | 1 min |
| 2 | Problem & motivation — why now, what prior work couldn’t do | 2 min |
| 3 | Core mechanism — your own hand-drawn figure | 5 min |
| 4 | One key result — what the single most important experiment proves | 3 min |
| 5 | Weakest assumption / limitation — your critique | 3 min |
| 6 | Connection — to follow-up work or your own research | 1 min |
Sample presentation
Sample deck — Self-Consistency (Wang et al., 2022) — a complete 6-slide presentation in exactly this template, prepared by the instructor. Open the speaker view (S) to see, slide by slide, why each slide is built the way it is. Use it as your model for structure and density — not as a source to copy.
Cold questions — the three types
- Mechanism / ablation — “What happens if you remove step X from this method?”
- Reproduction — “If you implemented this from scratch, what are the first three steps?” (directly tied to that week’s lab)
- Boundary / failure — “Construct one input or situation where this method fails.”
A student who memorized the paper cannot answer without the slides; a student who understood it can. That is exactly what these questions separate.
Grading rubric
| Item | Weight | Criterion |
|---|---|---|
| Core contribution | 30% | Is the paper’s contribution compressed accurately into one sentence? |
| Method understanding | 25% | Is the mechanism explained correctly? (intuition suffices for hard papers; cold-question answers count here) |
| Critical analysis | 25% | Did you identify the weakest assumption yourself? (cold-question answers count here) |
| Connection | 20% | Did you link to follow-up work or your own research? |
Discussant
Each presentation has one pre-assigned discussant: after the talk, 2 minutes of challenge or follow-up (e.g. “Slide 5’s limitation — is it actually fatal in practice?”). Both presenter and discussant are graded, so the audience reads the paper too.
Practical advice
- Six slides force compression, and compression forces understanding. If a slide is crowded, you haven’t decided what matters yet.
- Draw the slide-3 figure before writing anything else — if you can’t draw the mechanism, you don’t understand it yet.
- Rehearse once against the 15-minute timer. The hard stop is enforced.