academic search engines

Abstract: Representing scientific papers as points in a space lets us search for similar papers and inquire about how fields relate to one another and drive innovation. Beyond search, the vector space of papers invites generation: mixing papers through simple vector operations creates new points, mirroring combinatorial novelty, the recombination of existing ideas into new ones. However, a mixed point often represents an idea no paper has yet realized, with no papers nearby to identify the idea. We propose representing each paper by a LoRA adapter generated by the Doc-to-LoRA hypernetwork. Every point in the space, including mixtures, thus represents a large language model (LLM) open to questions and instructions in natural language. On papers from the American Physical Society (APS), we instruct the LLM at the average of each subfield to name the field in a few words and obtain labels closer to the official names than the labels of five baselines, as judged by word overlap and a panel of five LLM judges. We also ask the LLMs at points between two APS papers to write an abstract and obtain descriptions shifting from one paper to the other in step with the mixing weight. While Doc-to-LoRA is trained for generation, a small invertible transform makes the embeddings competitive for search, on par with SPECTER2 and EmbeddingGemma and close to SBERT. Because the transform is invertible, every point in the transformed space still maps back to an LLM. The embeddings thus serve both search and generation, enabling researchers to question the idea at any point in the space as a starting point for generating new ideas.

Abstract: Faithful citation attribution begins with identifying the intended source for a scientific claim. We study this source-identification capability through citation recovery: recovering the paper cited by the original author from a citation-bearing passage. Our evaluation adopts the published author's citation as an observable human attribution signal and uses target recovery as a proxy for progress toward faithful attribution. We introduce ATTRICITE, an open 4B-parameter model trained for tool-using citation recovery within the CiteGuard retrieval environment, together with CITEALIGN, a 7,607-instance computer-science dataset drawn from recent scientific literature. For controlled evaluation, we construct a 709-instance benchmark subset of CITEALIGN, comprising 410 development instances from 2024 publications and 299 temporally held-out test instances from 2025 publications. Across three runs at an inference temperature of 0.7, GRPO fine-tuning improves Qwen3-4B from 49.4%$\pm$1.5% to 59.8%$\pm$0.2% target-match accuracy, a gain of 10.4 percentage points. Despite using only 4B parameters, ATTRICITE outperforms gpt-oss-20b and comes within 3.9 points of GPT-5.4-mini, while Gemma 4 31B IT achieves the strongest overall performance at 72.0%$\pm$1.0%. We release the model and collection pipeline https://github.com/KathCYM/AttriCite to support reproducible research on citation recovery toward faithful attribution in a continually evolving scientific literature.