> Becoming an ML/DL researcher working on novel techniques or new models will be hard without academic research experience
This is not correct for current DL research. I know many undergrad engineers who wrote papers in top conferences. Current DL is mostly about implementing ideas, running experiments, having good sense of data etc. rather than theory. It's an open secret in DL that theories are just there to please reviewers and mostly gibberish and often time plain wrong. e.g. batch norm paper, where what they theorised about it was proven not just false but completely opposite. Still batch norm is heavily used because it works.
I didn't mean to imply it needed to be _graduate_ research - however it would be news to me if they were publishing at top conferences independently of a lab or research branch at a company.
I didn't said they were publishing independently, just they did not had any academic research experience. e.g. in FAANG, it's not hard to get into teams which publishes ML papers. Also, I know one guy who contacted one professor, and they collaborated and published few papers while doing full time engineering job.
This is not correct for current DL research. I know many undergrad engineers who wrote papers in top conferences. Current DL is mostly about implementing ideas, running experiments, having good sense of data etc. rather than theory. It's an open secret in DL that theories are just there to please reviewers and mostly gibberish and often time plain wrong. e.g. batch norm paper, where what they theorised about it was proven not just false but completely opposite. Still batch norm is heavily used because it works.