[quantum_magpie]

That's an insane workload to put out during a PhD. 5 Papers including 2 top-tier ones in 3-4 years? Is ML really full of such low-hanging fruit where that is possible?

In my stints around Denmark and Japan (Computational Chemistry) you basically need ~1 top-tier or ~3 mediocre papers during your 3-year PhD.

[chriskanan]

Norms vary per academic discipline and niche. My requirements are pretty much the standard for my field if you want a job doing research at FAIR, DeepMind, Adobe Research, Google Research, OpenAI, etc. Without meeting those goals students will not be able to get research oriented jobs at top places.

In the US, PhD students in Computer Science and similar fields usually require 5-7 years to finish. They typically do not have MS degrees, unlike in Europe, where the expected graduation time is 3-4 years and they must have MS degrees.

You would be surprised how often there is a lot of low-hanging fruit. I'm good at asking "easy" questions that nobody knows the answer to, so a student just has to put in the work to get the answer. Many advisors don't give as much initial hand holding as I do.

So far my PhD students have taken 3-6 years to finish. Those that have graduated so far have finished with 3 papers (3 years), 9 papers (3 years), and 12 papers (5.5 years). The senior ones still in my lab (year 4 or 5) are on track to have around 3 first author papers in top-venues and about 9 papers total each. Their first author papers are in CVPR, ICCV, ACL, ECCV, BMVC, NAACL, ICLR, AAAI, etc.

[ahartmetz]

Well, five smallest publishable units... optimizing for the wrong incentives that be.