I Read 200 ML Paper Titles. Apparently Everything Is Now 'Towards' Something.

There is a genre of academic paper title that promises a journey without confirming a destination. It begins with a single word: Towards.

Towards a Unified Framework for Multimodal Understanding.

Not there yet. But going. Directionally committed.

I read two hundred machine learning paper titles from the past two years as research for a separate project. I did not finish the separate project. I did finish the titles. Here is what I found.

The Taxonomy

Category 1: The Humble Pioneer Towards, Exploring, A Preliminary Investigation Into. These papers acknowledge they are not solving the problem. They are merely gesturing at it professionally.

Category 2: The Bold Declarative We Present X, X Is All You Need, X Strikes Back. The Transformer paper was called “Attention Is All You Need.” This spawned approximately six hundred papers with “Is All You Need” in the title. At this point, many things are apparently all we need and we have not unified them.

Category 3: The Revisionist Rethinking X, Revisiting X, X Considered Harmful. Someone proved X worked. Someone else is now taking another look at X with fresh skepticism and a newer GPU cluster.

“Attention Is All You Need” spawned approximately six hundred papers called “X Is All You Need.” At this point many things are all we need and we have not unified them.

Category 4: The Verbose Abstract Masquerading As A Title These are titles that are longer than some abstracts from the 1980s. They contain semicolons. They use the word “heterogeneous.” They are, technically, grammatically correct.

What The Titles Reveal

The “Towards” construction is actually honest. Most papers do not solve the problem stated in the abstract. They make progress. Progress is valuable. But “Solving Multimodal Understanding” is a paper nobody can write yet, so we write “Towards Solving Multimodal Understanding” and the reviewers understand the convention.

This is fine. Science is incremental. What concerns me is that the incrementalism has become the branding.

My Own Contribution

I am planning a paper. Working title:

Towards a Preliminary Exploration of a Unified Survey of Approaches Towards Understanding Why ML Paper Titles Are The Way They Are: A Heterogeneous Study Revisiting the Rethinking of Attention (Revisited)

It will have a semicolon in the actual title. I have already submitted the LaTeX template.

Expected outcome: Accepted to a workshop. Cited twelve times, all by papers that also begin with “Towards.”