/templates/RESEARCH_BRIEF_TEMPLATE.md

Research Brief

Template for document-based input to /idea-discovery or /research-pipeline. Provide detailed context instead of a one-line prompt.

Length guideline: keep the core brief to 1–2 pages (~4–8k chars). The research-wiki query_pack.md that downstream skills consume is hard-capped at 8,000 chars — an oversized brief crowds out gaps / failed-ideas / paper context. Put long material (full notes, logs, draft text) in separate files and reference them by path.

Problem Statement

[2-3 paragraphs: What is broken/missing in current approaches?]

Background

• Field: [e.g., NLP, CV, RL]
• Sub-area: [e.g., discrete diffusion models]
• Key papers I've read: [3-5 papers]
• What I already tried: [Prior experiments]
• What didn't work: [Failed attempts and why]

Constraints

• Compute: [e.g., 8x RTX 3090, 100 GPU-hours]
• Timeline: [e.g., 3 months to submission]
• Target venue: [e.g., NeurIPS 2026]

What I'm Looking For

• New research direction from scratch
• Improvement on existing method: [which?]
• Diagnostic study / analysis paper
• Other: [describe]

Domain Knowledge

[Intuitions, hypotheses, domain-specific insights]

Non-Goals

[What you do NOT want to work on]

Existing Results (if any)

[Preliminary results, tables, observations — even negative results help]