Comment by lemontheme

My take: if not for arxiv and huggingface, the field of ML would be nowhere near where it is today.

More to your question, I recommend something like semanticscholar to find actual relevant papers. Try to identify researchers that seem trustworthy, then explore the citation network around them.

For more hot off the press stuff, follow what gets boosted on social media.

Still doesn’t cover the truly niche stuff but it’s a start