GPT4 paper assistant: A daily ArXiv scanner

This repo implements a very simple daily scanner for Arxiv that uses GPT4 and author matches to find papers you might find interesting. It will run daily via github actions and can post this information to slack via a bot or just render it in a static github-pages website.

A simple demo of the daily papers can be seen here running on cs.CL

As a cost estimate, running this on all of cs.CL cost $0.07 on 2/7/2024

Changelog

• 2/15/2024: fixed a bug with author parsing in the RSS format + cost estimates for title filtering being off + crash when 0 papers are on the feed.
• 2/7/2024: fixed a critical issue from ArXiv changing their RSS format. Added and enabled a title filtering to reduce costs.

Quickstart

This is the minimal necessary steps to get the scanner to run. It is highly recommended to read the whole thing to decide what you want to run.

Running on github actions

1. Copy/fork this repo to a new github repo and enable scheduled workflows if you fork it.
2. Copy config/paper_topics.template.txt to config/paper_topics.txt and fill it out with the types of papers you want to follow
3. Copy config/authors.template.txt to config/authors.txt and list the authors you actually want to follow. The numbers behind the author are important. They are semantic scholar author IDs which you can find by looking up the authors on semantic scholar and taking the numbers at the end of the URL.
4. Set your desired ArXiv categories in config/config.ini.
5. Set your openai key (OAI_KEY) as ``a github secret
6. In your repo settings, set github page build sources to be github actions

At this point your bot should run daily and publish a static website. You can test this by running the github action workflow manually.

Optional but highly recommended:

7. Get and set up a semantic scholar API key (S2_KEY) as a github secret. Otherwise the author search step will be very slow
8. Set up a slack bot, get the OAuth key, set it to SLACK_KEY as a github secret
9. Make a channel for the bot (and invite it to the channel), get its Slack channel id, set it as SLACK_CHANNEL_ID in a github secret.
10. Take a look at configs/config.ini to tweak how things are filtered.
11. Set the github repo private to avoid github actions being set to inactive after 60 days

Each day at 1pm UTC, the bot will run and post to slack and publish a github pages website (see the publish_md and cron_runs actions for details).

Running locally

The steps are generally the same as above, but you have to set up the environment via requirements.txt

Instead of passing credentials via github secrets, you have to set environment variables OAI_KEY, SLACK_KEY, SLACK_CHANNEL_ID.

To run everything, just call main.py

Other notes: You may also want to not push to slack, in which case set your desired output endpoint (json, markdown, slack) in the dump_json, dump_md, and push_to_slack fields of config/config.ini.

If the semantic scholar API times out or is slow, you should get a S2 api key and set it as S2_KEY in your environment variables. (due to the limitations of github actions, this will only help if the code is run locally)

Making it run on its own: This whole thing takes almost no compute, so you can rent the cheapest VM from AWS, put this repo in it, install the requirements.txt appropriately set up the environment variables and add the following crontab

0 13 * * * python ~/arxiv_scanner/main.py

This crontab will run the script every 1pm UTC, 6pm pacific.

Making the paper_topics.txt prompt

The paper_topics.txt file is used to generate the prompt for GPT. It is a list of topics that you want to follow. One set of examples might be something like

 1. New methodological improvements to RLHF or instruction-following which are specific fine-tuning steps that are taken to make language models better at following user instructions across a range of tasks.
    - Relevant: papers that discuss specific methods like RLHF, or instruction-tuning datasets, improving these methods, or analyzing them.
    - Not relevant: papers about adaptation to some task. Simply following instructions or inputs are not sufficient.
 2. Shows new powerful test set contamination or membership inference methods for language models. Test set contamination is the phenomenon where a language model observes a benchmark dataset during pretraining.
    - Relevant: test statistics that can detect contamination of benchmarks in language models. statistics that can provide guarantees are more interesting. membership inference methods that are general enough to apply to language models are also relevant.
    - Not relevant: any papers that do not consider language models, or that do not consider test set contamination.
 3. Shows a significant advance in the performance of diffusion language models.
    - Relevant: papers that study language models that are also diffusion models. Continuous diffusions are even more relevant, while discrete diffusions are less so.
    - Not relevant: papers about image diffusions like DALL-E or Stable Diffusion, or papers that do not explicitly mention language models or applications to text.

This is just a standard prompt, but being very specific can help, especially for things like 'diffusion language models' or 'instruction-following', where the LM can get confused about whether image diffusions are relevant, or if doing some task better is sufficient to improve instruction following.

You may also want to follow this with some general interest areas like

In suggesting papers to your friend, remember that he enjoys papers on statistical machine learning, and generative modeling in natural language processing.
 Your friend also likes learning about surprising empirical results in language models, as well as clever statistical tricks.
 He does not want to read papers that are about primarily applications of methods to specific domains.

Details of how it works

The script grabs a candidate set of ArXiv papers for a specific day, via the RSS feeds. To avoid double-announcing papers, it will only grab an RSS feed within the last day. To avoid missing papers, you'd want to run this every day. It filters out any UPDATED papers and announces only new ones.

The filtering logic is pretty simple. We first check for author match.

1. Do a lookup of the authors on semantic scholar, getting a list of candidate matches.
2. Check the authors of the paper. If the author semantic scholar id matches someone in authors.txt it goes in the candidate set with a default score of author_match_score.

We then check for GPT-evaluated relevance. We do this in two steps.

1. Filter out any papers that have no authors with h-index above hcutoff in config.ini. This is to reduce costs.
2. All remaining examples get batched, and are evaluated by a GPT model specified by model in config.ini. You should only use GPT3.5 for debugging. It does not work well for this purpose! This step uses the following prompt setup defined in configs/

You are a helpful paper reading assistant whose job is to read daily posts from ArXiv and identify a few papers that might be relevant for your friend. There will be up to 5 papers below. Your job is to find papers that:

1. Criterion 1
2. Criterion 2

[PAPERS]

Write the response in JSONL format with {ARXIVID, COMMENT, RELEVANCE, NOVELTY} on each line, one for each paper. The ARXIVID should be the ArXiv ID. The COMMENT should identify whether there is a criteria that match the paper very closely. If so, it should mention it by number (no need to mention the non-matching criteria). These matches should not be based on general terms like "language modeling" or "advancements" and should specifically refer to a criterion. The RELEVANCE should be a relevance score from 1-10 where 10 must be directly related to the exact, specific criterion with near-synonym keyword matches and authors who are known for working on the topic, 1 is irrelevant to any criterion, and unrelated to your friend's general interest area, 2-3 is papers that are relevant to the general interest area, but not specific criteria, and 5 is a direct match to a specific criterion. The NOVELTY should be a score from 1 to 10, where 10 is a groundbreaking, general-purpose discovery that would transform the entire field and 1 is work that improves one aspect of a problem or is an application to a very specific field. Read the abstract carefully to determine this and assume that authors cannot be trusted in their claims of novelty.

3. GPT scores the papers for relevance (to the topics in config/papers_topics.txt) and novelty (scale 1-10)
4. Papers are filtered if they have scores below either the relevance and novelty cutoffs in config.ini
5. Papers are given an overall score based on equal weight to relevance and novelty

Finally, all papers are sorted by the max of their author_match_score and the sum of the GPT-rated relevance and novelty scores (the relevance and novelty scores will only show up in the final output if they are above the cutoff thresholds you set in the config file). Then the papers are rendered and pushed into their endpoints (text files or Slack).

Contributing

This repo uses ruff - ruff check . and ruff format . Please install the pre-commit hook by running pre-commit install

Testing and improving the GPT filter

The filter_papers.py code can also be run as a standalone script. This will take a batch of papers in in/debug_papers.json, run whatever config and prompts you have and return an output to out/filter_paper_test.debug.json. If you find the bot makes mistakes, you can find the associated batch in out/gpt_paper_batches.debug.json and copy that into the relevant debug_papers file.

This lets you build a benchmark for the filter and to see what comes out on the other side.

Other stuff

This repo and code was originally built by Tatsunori Hashimoto is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license. Thanks to Chenglei Si for testing and benchmarking the GPT filter.