/experiment-plan

name: experiment-plan
description: 'Turn a refined research proposal or method idea into a detailed, claim-driven experiment roadmap. Use after `research-refine`, or when the user asks for a detailed experiment plan, ablation matrix, evaluation protocol, run order, compute budget, or paper-ready validation that supports the core problem, novelty, simplicity, and any LLM / VLM / Diffusion / RL-based contribution.'
allowed-tools: Bash(*), Read, Write, Edit, Grep, Glob, WebSearch, WebFetch

Experiment Plan: Claim-Driven, Paper-Oriented Validation

Refine and concretize: **$ARGUMENTS**

Overview

Use this skill after the method is stable enough that the next question becomes: **what exact experiments should we run, in what order, to defend the paper?** If the user wants the full chain in one request, prefer `/research-refine-pipeline`.

The goal is not to generate a giant benchmark wishlist. The goal is to turn a proposal into a **claim -> evidence -> run order** roadmap that supports four things:

1. the method actually solves the anchored problem 2. the dominant contribution is real and focused 3. the method is elegant enough that extra complexity is unnecessary 4. any frontier-model-era component is genuinely useful, not decorative

Constants

• **OUTPUT_DIR = `refine-logs/`** — Default destination for experiment planning artifacts.
• **MAX_PRIMARY_CLAIMS = 2** — Prefer one dominant claim plus one supporting claim.
• **MAX_CORE_BLOCKS = 5** — Keep the must-run experimental story compact.
• **MAX_BASELINE_FAMILIES = 3** — Prefer a few strong baselines over many weak ones.
• **DEFAULT_SEEDS = 3** — Use 3 seeds when stochastic variance matters and budget allows.

Workflow

Phase 0: Load the Proposal Context

Read the most relevant existing files first if they exist:

• `refine-logs/FINAL_PROPOSAL.md`
• `refine-logs/REVIEW_SUMMARY.md`
• `refine-logs/REFINEMENT_REPORT.md`

Extract:

• **Problem Anchor**
• **Dominant contribution**
• **Optional supporting contribution**
• **Critical reviewer concerns**
• **Data / compute / timeline constraints**
• **Which frontier primitive is central, if any**

If these files do not exist, derive the same information from the user's prompt.

Phase 1: Freeze the Paper Claims

Before proposing experiments, write down the claims that must be defended.

Use this structure:

• **Primary claim**: the main mechanism-level contribution
• **Supporting claim**: optional, only if it directly strengthens the main paper story
• **Anti-claim to rule out**: e.g. "the gain only comes from more parameters," "the gain only comes from a larger search space," or "the modern component is just decoration"
• **Minimum convincing evidence**: what would make each claim believable to a strong reviewer?

Do not exceed `MAX_PRIMARY_CLAIMS` unless the paper truly has multiple inseparable claims.

Phase 2: Build the Experimental Storyline

Design the paper around a compact set of experiment blocks. Default to the following blocks and delete any that are not needed:

1. **Main anchor result** — does the method solve the actual bottleneck? 2. **Novelty isolation** — does the dominant contribution itself matter? 3. **Simplicity / elegance check** — can a bigger or more fragmented version be avoided? 4. **Frontier necessity check** — if an LLM / VLM / Diffusion / RL-era component is central, is it actually the right tool? 5. **Failure analysis or qualitative diagnosis** — what does the method still miss?

For each block, decide whether it belongs in:

• **Main paper** — essential to defend the core claims
• **Appendix** — useful but non-blocking
• **Cut** — interesting, but not worth the paper budget

Prefer one strong baseline family over many weak baselines. If a stronger modern baseline exists, use it instead of padding the list.

Phase 3: Specify Each Experiment Block

For every kept block, fully specify:

• **Claim tested**
• **Why this block exists**
• **Dataset / split / task**
• **Compared systems**: strongest baselines, ablations, and variants only
• **Metrics**: decisive metrics first, secondary metrics second
• **Setup details**: backbone, frozen vs trainable parts, key hyperparameters, training budget, seeds
• **Success criterion**: what outcome would count as convincing evidence?
• **Failure interpretation**: if the result is negative, what does it mean?
• **Table / figure target**: where this result should appear in the paper

Special rules:

• A **simplicity check** should usually compare the final method against either an overbuilt variant or a tempting extra component that the paper intentionally rejects.
• A **frontier necessity check** should usually compare the chosen modern primitive against the strongest plausible simpler or older alternative.
• If the proposal is intentionally non-frontier, say so explicitly and skip the frontier block instead of forcing one.

Phase 4: Turn the Plan Into an Execution Order

Build a realistic run order so the user knows what to do first.

Use this milestone structure:

1. **Sanity stage** — data pipeline, metric correctness, one quick overfit or toy split 2. **Baseline stage** — reproduce the strongest baseline(s) 3. **Main method stage** — run the final method on the primary setting 4. **Decision stage** — run the decisive ablations for novelty, simplicity, and frontier necessity 5. **Polish stage** — robustness, qualitative figures, appendix extras

For each milestone, estimate:

• compute cost
• expected turnaround time
• stop / go decision gate
• risk and mitigation

Separate **must-run** from **nice-to-have** experiments.

Phase 5: Write the Outputs

Step 5.1: Write `refine-logs/EXPERIMENT_PLAN.md`

Use this structure:

# Experiment Plan

**Problem**: [problem]
**Method Thesis**: [one-sentence thesis]
**Date**: [today]

## Claim Map
| Claim | Why It Matters | Minimum Convincing Evidence | Linked Blocks |
|-------|-----------------|-----------------------------|--------------