paperpulse 0.1.3

Relevance-ranked arXiv digests: the few papers that actually matter to you, summarised.

PaperPulse

The five papers that actually matter to you today — ranked, trust-scored, and summarised in plain English.

📄 See a real digest generated today →  ·  🗺️ Roadmap  ·  🧪 Annotated sample

arXiv drops hundreds of papers a day. Summaries are a solved problem; triage isn't. PaperPulse is built around the two questions that actually waste your time:

1. Which of today's 200 papers are relevant to me? — a learnable interest profile ranks every abstract by similarity to what you care about, and a thumbs-up/down feedback loop sharpens it over time.
2. Which of those should I actually trust? — a set of offline signal-quality heuristics flag over-claiming, missing error bars, weak baselines, likely data leakage, benchmark-chasing, and incremental "me-too" work, before you sink twenty minutes into the PDF.

It runs out of the box with no API keys and no model downloads (local hashing embeddings + extractive summaries), and scales up cleanly to semantic embeddings and LLM summaries when you want them.

pip install paperpulse    # or: pip install -e .  (from a clone)
paperpulse init           # write a starter paperpulse.yaml
# edit `interests` and `categories`
paperpulse run            # today's ranked, trust-scored digest -> digests/YYYY-MM-DD.md

The sample digest is annotated to show the finance paper getting a 🚩 leakage flag and the hype paper collecting four flags while a careful LoRA study rises to the top.

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Why it's not just another arXiv scraper

	Typical "arXiv + LLM" script	PaperPulse
Ranking	none / recency	learnable interest vector + MMR diversity
Personalisation	static keywords	Rocchio feedback loop, per-user profiles
Trust	blind trust in the summary	10+ signal-quality checks with a badge
Novelty	—	crowding score flags incremental work
Provenance	—	every summary line traces back to a source sentence
Cost to start	API key required	runs fully offline

How the ranking works

1. Embed each abstract into a stable vector space. The default HashingBackend needs no model and no training, so a profile learned today is still comparable next week. Install paperpulse[semantic] to switch to sentence-transformers for sharper semantics — same interface, better vectors.
2. Score by cosine similarity to your interest vector.
3. Select the top N with Maximal Marginal Relevance, trading a little relevance for variety so you don't get five near-identical papers.
4. Learn. paperpulse feedback --like 2407.00004 --dislike 2407.00002 nudges the profile toward what you liked and away from what you didn't (Rocchio), anchored so it never drifts far from the interests you wrote down.

The trust layer

Working from a title and abstract we can't prove a paper is sound — but we can cheaply flag the patterns that correlate with weaker work. Each signal is deterministic, explains itself, and rolls up into a 🟢 clean / 🟡 mixed / 🔴 caution badge. Any hard red flag keeps a paper out of "clean".

Every flag is legible: it shows the exact phrase that tripped it and a confidence so you can dismiss weak heuristics at a glance, not just a colour. A peer-review / venue signal separates published or venue-accepted work from preprint-only (and flags papers that have sat on arXiv for years, still v1, with no venue). Each paper also carries a worth-it score — relevance × trust — to answer "is this worth my next 30 minutes?"

Several are drawn straight from systematic-trading research discipline:

• crowding / novelty — is the method a cosmetic rehash of neighbours in the same batch?
• subgroup robustness — do strong aggregate numbers hide weak subgroups?
• metric gaming — did a metric move without a genuine underlying gain?
• deployability — oracle inputs, look-ahead features, or unrealistic compute?
• leakage — random splits on time-series/financial data (a classic lookahead trap)
• baseline fairness, evidence / error bars, over-claiming, benchmark saturation, reproducibility (code/data links)

Turn on --online (or trust_online: true) to add dead-link detection, a Retraction Watch cross-check, and a self-citation ratio (via Semantic Scholar — set S2_API_KEY for higher rate limits).

Beyond the digest

• Multiple sources — arXiv, bioRxiv/medRxiv, and PubMed behind one interface (paperpulse run --source pubmed). Adding OpenReview/SSRN is one adapter.
• Contradiction mapping — surfaces pairs of closely-related papers that report opposing outcomes.
• Cross-reference your own work — paperpulse similar my_model.py finds papers whose methods are functionally closest to your code or notebook.
• Market context for finance papers — when a paper names a well-known asset (an index, crypto, commodity, or mega-cap), the dashboard tags it with the latest price from Yahoo Finance so you can sanity-check a claim at a glance. Stdlib-only, no API key.
• Delivery anywhere — Markdown file, email (SMTP), RSS feed, or Slack/Discord webhook.
• Community trust store — a self-hostable SQLite DB that pools trust reports across users and builds an over-claiming leaderboard.

Three ways to use it

# 1. CLI
paperpulse run --source arxiv --categories cs.LG cs.CL

# 2. Python SDK
python -c "from paperpulse.pipeline import run_digest; from paperpulse.config import Config; \
           print(run_digest(Config(), dry_run=True).markdown)"

# 3. REST API + web dashboard (stdlib only, no extra deps)
paperpulse serve            # http://127.0.0.1:8000
#   Interactive topic-filter bar (Finance / Economics / Quant), loads instantly,
#   with live price chips on any paper that names a major asset.
#   GET /api/digest?cats=q-fin.TR,econ.GN   POST /api/feedback   GET /api/community/leaderboard

Or with Docker:

docker compose up          # dashboard on :8000, state persisted in a volume

Configuration

paperpulse init writes a commented paperpulse.yaml (see paperpulse.example.yaml). Everything is config-driven: sources, categories, which trust signals to enable, ranking diversity, and delivery.

Secrets are read from the environment, never the config file: OPENAI_API_KEY / ANTHROPIC_API_KEY (LLM summaries), PAPERPULSE_SMTP_* (email), PAPERPULSE_SLACK_WEBHOOK / PAPERPULSE_DISCORD_WEBHOOK, NCBI_API_KEY.

Scheduling

Run it daily with cron, or use the included GitHub Action (.github/workflows/digest.yml) to generate and commit a digest every weekday morning.

Development

pip install -e ".[dev]"
pytest

The full test suite is offline — no network, no keys — so it runs anywhere.

See ROADMAP.md for what's shipped and what's next.

Publishing

pip install build twine && python -m build && twine check dist/* builds and validates the wheel. Cutting a GitHub Release then publishes it to PyPI via release.yml (Trusted Publishing — no token in the repo; add the publisher once on PyPI first). Or push manually with twine upload dist/*.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.