[cauliflower2718]

It looks like it's written in latex to me. Standard formatting varies across departments, and the author is in the business school at CMU.

In some fields, single author papers are more common. Also, outside of ML conference culture, the journal publication process can be pretty slow.

Based on the above (which is separate from an actual evaluation of the paper), there are no immediate red flags.

Source: I am a PhD student and read papers across stats/CS/OR.

[ersiees]

Another clue: there is no way to download the latex, while you can if someone uploaded the latex on arxiv.

[cauliflower2718]

There's a lazy way to submit to arxiv, which is to submit just the PDF, even if you did it in latex. Sometimes it can be annoying to organize the tex files to submit to arxiv. It's uncommon, but the font and math rendering are the standard latex font.

[woolion]

The Latex feel comes in good part from the respect for typographical standards that is encoded as default behaviour. In this document, so many spacings are just flat-out wrong, first paragraph indents, etc. If it's indeed Latex (it kinda looks like it), someone worked hard to make it look bad.

The weirdest thing is that copy-paste doesn't work; if I copy the "3.1" of the corresponding equation, I get " . "