missing ablations
Claims without ablating each architectural choice.
What it is
A method paper that proposes 5 architectural changes and reports the combined effect tells you nothing about which changes mattered. Maybe 4 of them were noise and only 1 drove the gain — or maybe two changes interact destructively and you'd be better off with just one.
Why a reviewer cares
Reviewers ask: which component caused the improvement? Each non-trivial design choice should have an ablation isolating its contribution. The pattern 'we added X, Y, and Z and beat the baseline' is incomplete evidence.
How to fix it
For each architectural or training-recipe change, run an ablation: same model with that one change removed. Report the per-ablation effect. Components that don't survive ablation should either be removed from the paper or kept with the honest framing that they didn't help.
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