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Method Search Command

The method-search command finds papers that use specific methods, techniques, or algorithms.

Basic Usage

scoutml method-search METHOD [OPTIONS]

Examples

# Find papers using BERT
scoutml method-search "BERT"

# Papers using specific technique
scoutml method-search "attention mechanism"

# Algorithm-specific search
scoutml method-search "Adam optimizer"

Sorted Results

# Most cited papers using method
scoutml method-search "ResNet" --sort-by citations

# Recent papers using method
scoutml method-search "GPT" --sort-by year

# Most novel applications
scoutml method-search "contrastive learning" --sort-by novelty

Options

Option Type Default Description
--limit INTEGER 20 Number of results
--sort-by CHOICE citations Sort by: citations/year/novelty
--year-min INTEGER None Minimum publication year
--year-max INTEGER None Maximum publication year
--output CHOICE table Output format: table/json/csv
--export PATH None Export results to file

Method Types

Model Architectures

# Transformer variants
scoutml method-search "Vision Transformer"
scoutml method-search "Swin Transformer"

# CNN architectures
scoutml method-search "EfficientNet"
scoutml method-search "MobileNet"

# RNN variants
scoutml method-search "LSTM"
scoutml method-search "GRU"

Training Techniques

# Optimization methods
scoutml method-search "AdamW"
scoutml method-search "LAMB optimizer"

# Regularization
scoutml method-search "dropout"
scoutml method-search "weight decay"

# Learning strategies
scoutml method-search "curriculum learning"
scoutml method-search "meta-learning"

Loss Functions

# Specific losses
scoutml method-search "focal loss"
scoutml method-search "triplet loss"
scoutml method-search "InfoNCE loss"

Sorting Strategies

By Citations

Find the most influential papers using a method:

scoutml method-search "CLIP" --sort-by citations --limit 10

By Year

Find the latest developments:

scoutml method-search "diffusion models" --sort-by year --limit 20

By Novelty

Discover innovative applications:

scoutml method-search "transformer" --sort-by novelty --domain "audio"

Advanced Usage

Evolution of Methods

Track how a method evolved over time:

# Early papers
scoutml method-search "GAN" --year-max 2016 --sort-by year

# Recent advances
scoutml method-search "GAN" --year-min 2022 --sort-by citations

Method Combinations

Find papers using multiple methods:

# Search for each method and find intersections
scoutml method-search "BERT" --output json > bert.json
scoutml method-search "knowledge distillation" --output json > kd.json

# Process with jq or similar tools

Domain-Specific Methods

# Vision-specific
scoutml method-search "DETR" --year-min 2021

# NLP-specific
scoutml method-search "RoBERTa" --sort-by citations

# Multi-modal
scoutml method-search "ALIGN" --limit 15

Output Examples

Table Output

scoutml method-search "SimCLR" --limit 5

Shows papers with: - How they use SimCLR - Modifications or improvements - Application domains - Performance metrics

JSON Output

scoutml method-search "BERT" --output json

Returns: 

[
  {
    "arxiv_id": "1908.08962",
    "title": "Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using...",
    "method_usage": "Modifies BERT architecture for sentence embeddings",
    "novelty": "First to adapt BERT for sentence similarity",
    "citations": 3000
  }
]

Finding Variants

Discover variations of popular methods:

# BERT variants
scoutml method-search "BERT" --sort-by novelty

# Shows: RoBERTa, ALBERT, DistilBERT, etc.

Method Impact Analysis

Highly Cited Methods

# Most influential uses of a method
scoutml method-search "attention" --sort-by citations --limit 50

Recent Innovations

# New applications in last 2 years
scoutml method-search "contrastive learning" \
  --year-min 2022 \
  --sort-by novelty

Best Practices

  1. Use exact names: "Vision Transformer" not "ViT" (unless commonly used)
  2. Check variants: Search both full names and abbreviations
  3. Explore novelty: Use --sort-by novelty for innovative applications
  4. Track evolution: Use year filters to see method development
  5. Compare implementations: Export results to analyze differences

Common Searches

# Transformers
scoutml method-search "BERT"
scoutml method-search "GPT"
scoutml method-search "T5"

# Vision Models
scoutml method-search "ResNet"
scoutml method-search "YOLO"
scoutml method-search "Mask R-CNN"

# Generative Models
scoutml method-search "GAN"
scoutml method-search "VAE"
scoutml method-search "Diffusion Models"

Training Technique Searches

# Self-supervised
scoutml method-search "SimCLR"
scoutml method-search "MoCo"
scoutml method-search "BYOL"

# Few-shot Learning
scoutml method-search "MAML"
scoutml method-search "Prototypical Networks"

Troubleshooting

Method Not Found

If no results: 1. Try alternative names (e.g., "Gaussian Process" vs "GP") 2. Check spelling and capitalization 3. Use more general terms 4. Search for the paper that introduced the method

Too Many Results

To narrow down: 1. Add year constraints 2. Use specific variant names 3. Sort by novelty for unique applications 4. Increase citation threshold