Congratulations on your first first-author publication in a conference. The topic seems very interesting and I have yet to give the paper a good read-through, but I already like how well-presented it is.
Did you use TikZ for the diagrams and matplotlib for the graphs?
I'm already thinking about how to replicate that blue arrow in Fig. 2. It looks very clean. And the patterns in the plots do have a pgfplots vibe to it, so that makes sense.
In case you're not aware, it is also possible to have pgf outputs that preserve scaling with matplotlib with similar serif fonts for the labels that you can specify in
matplotlibrcof the project. Hopefully you'd find that useful if you ever decide to use matplotlib beyond some quick plots.