plumspringrollsEven research level stuff (let's say getting published in NeurIPS/ICLR/ICML etc.) doesn't need to have a ton of math depending on what you do.
Is this even true lol. For the conferences you mentioned almost all papers are primarily math.
a lot of ml papers are essentially math papers and the main contribution is their analysis, but a lot are also basically just "we use different linear algebra, make big, state of art result!!!" (and then take some math from a textbook / other papers and add it related work / background to make look cooler.)
edit: ninja'd by 20 minutes :-) agree w/ u bby