aistats-writing-style

AISTATS Writing Style

Use this when revising the main paper. AISTATS papers need compact statements of why a

statistical or ML contribution matters and enough detail for technical validation.

Revision rules

• Put the AI/statistics contribution in the first page: problem, gap, method or theorem,

evidence, and why existing methods are insufficient.

• Make assumptions explicit. AISTATS reviewers are sensitive to hidden distributional,

asymptotic, optimization, or data-generating assumptions.

• Pair every major claim with either proof structure, simulation design, empirical table, or

reproducibility detail.

• Use the 8-page body for core logic; move long derivations, extra simulations, and extended

ablations to the appendix without making the main paper unintelligible.

• Avoid overclaiming empirical wins when differences are small or variance is unreported.
• Maintain double-blind style in self-citations, prior code references, acknowledgements,

funding, and artifact descriptions.

Theorem-presentation discipline

• Number assumptions and cite them by label inside every theorem statement; AISTATS readers

audit assumption flows the way software reviewers audit imports.

• Give each major theorem a proof sketch in the body; the appendix proof supports the sketch

but never replaces it.

• Keep problem-dependent constants visible or explicitly deferred; silently absorbing

dimension or condition numbers into O-notation is a standing statistician complaint.

• Define notation once in one location — two-column pages punish redundant redefinition.
• Phrase remarks after theorems as interpretation, not as extra unproved claims; AISTATS

reviewers treat every declarative sentence near a theorem as something they may verify.

• When a result is conjectured or only empirically supported, label it so; mixing proved and

observed statements in one paragraph is a credibility leak at this venue.

Sentence-level rewrites

| Draft pattern | AISTATS-safe rewrite |

|---|---|

| "Our method significantly outperforms..." | "reduces mean error by X (SE Y) over Z seeded runs" |

| "Under mild conditions..." | "Under Assumptions 1-3 (boundedness, ...)" |

| "It is easy to see that..." | "By Lemma 2 and the triangle inequality..." |

| "Achieves state-of-the-art..." | Claim scoped to the regimes actually tested |

Vignette: compressing into eight two-column pages

A draft with three theorems, six figures, and a sprawling related-work section: keep all

theorem statements, one sketch each, and the two decision-critical figures (the rate plot

and the coverage plot); compress related work into contribution contrasts; move secondary

lemmas and four figures to the appendix with explicit forward references. The test of a good

cut: a reviewer should reconstruct the whole argument without ever opening the supplement.

Output format

[Writing diagnosis] clear / under-justified / overclaimed / overloaded
[First-page fix] <new framing>
[Claim discipline] <claim -> proof/experiment/limitation>
[Compression cuts] <move/delete/merge>
[Anonymity edits] <phrases to rewrite>