Im an incoming masters student in ML, a bit older than most (31). I’ve read 100s of papers over the last 7/8 years from the foundational papers in the field to niche papers that never got adopted (Hinton’s forward forward, capsule networks). Ive also replicated dozens of papers during this time.

It may seem small to most here, but It would be an amazing dream to do publish a conference quality paper but all my research ideas feel so clunky, inelegant and crude. My ADHD lets me to spawn hundreds of ideas and hyperfocus on a couple, so far all my preliminary work doesnt point to anything really novel.

I dont understand how first authors come up with beautiful results like engrams, diffusion models, VAEs, MoEs, token superposition in pretraining, that seems so obvious when you read the paper but clearly are anything but obvious.

Are these people just built different or did their research also start off clunky? Is it just luck? Most PIs dont expect to lead the research so it cant be an astute PI?