I'm an undergraduate student just getting started with a proper research in machine learning. Oftentimes, when I'm experimenting with new ideas, I find that a similar or better research was already published few years back. In most cases, since the research I found was much better than my current experimental idea, I read that paper and move on.
But recently, I have found that many of my newer ideas are NOT yet published anywhere but most of them are submitted for review to different conferences (on OpenReview etc.) or some form of pre-print manuscript for them is available on arXiv.
Is it ethical in such to submit my idea to another conference as a publication ? It is really demotivating for me since I can't provide any publishable research for my thesis. Can someone suggest me a way to avoid situations like this ? (Searching on arXiv/Google doesn't help because the terminology used is sometimes very different)