The nature of doing research is exploration and understanding, not merely in chasing state-of-the-art (SOTA) results.

Many students new to research tend to equate “doing research” with “achieving SOTA”. They believe that setting a new SOTA is the primary way to demonstrate novelty and getting published. However, this view somewhat mistakes cause for effect.

The goal of research is actually quite simple: to understand what makes an approach work, and why.

Research should aim to explain what works and what doesn’t, identify which design choices are the true driving factors behind improvements, and clarify under what conditions certain methods perform well. These fundamental insights and principles are the truly valuable and meaningful parts of research.

Once we understand the underlying mechanisms, we can design methods based on that understanding, which naturally leads to better performance. In other words, strong performance is actually a byproduct of deep understanding.

This perspective also explains why many “A+B” style papers are often criticized for lacking novelty. Such works typically combine existing techniques to see which configuration yields the best results or achieves SOTA. They often fail to provide evidence of what fundamental problem their approach actually solves or whether it generalizes beyond a specific task. While such result-oriented works may be valuable for industrial product development, academic research should focus more on providing insights.

In contrast, research that carefully studies when and why a particular method works, supports its claims with both experimental and theoretical evidence, and demonstrates that the findings generalize across tasks, is more appreciated. Even if the results are not SOTA, such work can still be impactful and inspires others to make progress in the field.