AI4Paper — A Practical Guide to Writing AI/ML Research Papers

A book on how to plan, run, write, submit, and revise AI/ML research papers, organized along the research lifecycle and typeset with Typst.

Structure

book/
├── ai4paper.typ                 # Main file: title page, TOC, preface, includes, bibliography
├── common.typ                   # Shared theorem environments, colors, and text helpers
├── references.bib               # Bibliography (IEEE-style)
├── chapters/                    # One file per chapter, in research-lifecycle order
│   ├── 01-foundations.typ
│   ├── 02-setup.typ
│   ├── 03-find-problem.typ
│   ├── 04-experiments.typ
│   ├── 05-data-figures.typ
│   ├── 06-writing.typ
│   ├── 07-submit.typ
│   ├── 08-revision.typ
│   └── 09-after-acceptance.typ
└── figures/                     # CeTZ figure sources + compiled PDFs (embedded as images)
    ├── chapter-map.typ
    └── chapter-map.pdf

Every chapter starts with #import "../common.typ": * and is included from ai4paper.typ in order.

Building

Prerequisites

• Typst (latest version)
• Source Han Serif (CJK fallback font — the text is mixed English/Chinese)

The only package dependency is theorion, fetched automatically from the Typst package registry on first compile.

Local compilation

typst compile --root . ai4paper.typ

The compiled ai4paper.pdf is not tracked — it is a build artifact.

Automated releases

The PDF is built by GitHub Actions, not committed. Pushing a version tag (e.g. v1.0.0) triggers .github/workflows/release.yml, which:

1. Installs Source Han Serif and Typst
2. Compiles ai4paper.typ (this is the build gate — a broken source fails the run)
3. Builds the release notes from the matching ## X.Y.Z section of CHANGELOG.md, falling back to a git log summary if that section is absent
4. Publishes a GitHub Release with the PDF attached as ai4paper-v1.0.0.pdf

The book carries no version string of its own: the git tag plus the top ## X.Y.Z heading in CHANGELOG.md is the version-of-record. Cutting a release — choosing the bump, writing the changelog section, tagging and pushing — is scripted in prompt/release.md. The short version:

# 1. add a `## X.Y.Z` section to CHANGELOG.md (see prompt/release.md)
# 2. commit it, then:
git tag -a v1.0.0 -m v1.0.0
git push origin main
git push origin v1.0.0

Authoring with Claude Code

.claude/skills/ vendors the two skills used to write this book, pinned by skills-lock.json:

• creating-figures — publication-quality CeTZ figures for the figures/ directory
• isomoes-writing — objective, narrative-driven technical prose

License

Licensed under the MIT License. See LICENSE for details.