How to come up with research ideas

Find a different dimension Just learn a cool idea from others? Think about how you could extend it to another dimension. Ex: Text / audio / image / video / graph

Relax assumptions Identify the underlying assumptions of existing work and try relaxing them to make it work in more unconstrained settings.

Make more assumptions Take a general approach and tailor it to your SPECIFIC problem. You can then leverage all the domain knowledge (i.e., make more assumptions) to improve the method.

Combine two ideas/problems "To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism. To steal from many is research." - Wilson Mizner

Grab a powerful hammer and find all the nails Pay attention to new emerging tools in the community. Apply and adapt them on your problem.

Add an adjective Given an existing idea X, add an adjective to make it slow!-> fast batch->online sensitive->robust centralized->distributed single-step->progressive single-level!->hierarchical fixed!->adaptive, sth-aware data-hungry->data-efficient and so on

Stress test the state-of-the-art Don't simply run on the fixed, boring benchmark datasets. Try it out on diverse, unconstrained examples and see how it fails. It's a great way to identify limitations of existing work. This is where your work can fill the gap.

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