To feed Arxiv papers to LLMs I found that RST gives the best token count/fidelity ratio. Markdown lacks precision. LateX is too verbose. I have a script with the paper's urls, name and date that downloads the LateX zips from Arxiv, extracts it, transforms them to RST and then adds them to the right folder. Then I ask a LLM to make a summary from the full text, then I give other LLMs the full paper again with the summary and ask them to improve on and and proofread them. While this goes on I read the papers myself and at the end I read the summaries and if I approve them I add it to the skill. I also add for each paper info on how well the algorithms described do in common benchmarks.
I highly recommend doing something similar if you're working in a cutting-edge domain. Also I'd like to know if anyone has recommendations to improve what I do.
Reading all the papers once isn't the same as this. I find it very useful.
I can ask an LLM to do the basic implementations, then I can refine them (make the code better, faster, cut on memory use), then I can ask the LLM if I'm still implementing the algorithms as they're described in the paper.
Literally every project. If it's something that's been done a million times then that means it has good literature on it? If not, then even more important to find related stuff! And not just crunchy CS stuff like databases or compilers or whatever. Are you creating a UI? There's probably been great UI research you can base off of! Will this game loop be fun in the game you're building? There's probably been research about it!
Also I wonder who/what decides what papers go in there.
In the blog post, the agent is allowed to do its own search.
I'm working on this also from a different angle. Hopefully sharing adds to the conversation.
First, about the loop, Claude's (coding agent) context and attention is big enough to self-reflect. Agent Tuning shows a technique that not only demonstrates this but a way quantify it. [0] The difference is autoresearch's val_bpb measures what the agent built; Agent Tuning's p̂ measures the agent itself.
> Claude's attention doesn't distinguish between "instructions I'm writing" and "instructions I'm following" -- they're both just tokens in context.
Second, doing research, finding academic research to add to context helps. Here is an example of an implementation that creates trading strategies by reading research and recreating them in creative new ways. [1]
The biggest problem is the coding agents don't "Fail fast and loud". They fail deceivingly.
However, I'd be curious to hear back from others who have tried adding the shell script (at the end of the article) to their flow: does it (really) improve Claude?
We added a literature review phase to Karpathy’s autoresearch loop and pointed it at llama.cpp. The agent autonomously read arxiv papers, studied competing forks and spun up VMs to run parallel experiments.
> The full setup works with any project that has a benchmark and test suite.
so having a clear and measurable verification step is key. Meaning you can't simply give an AI agent a vague goal e.g. "improve the quality of the codebase" because it's too general.
> TL;DR: Coding agents generate better optimizations when they read papers and study competing projects before touching code
What made you think I hadn't read the article, let alone that TL;DR? I'm really curious. Jumping to an insulting "have you read the article" is a big step, so it'll be really interesting to see where your mind went.