Alphaxiv

Quick single-paper lookup via AlphaXiv LLM-optimized summaries with tiered source fallback. Use when user says "explain this paper", "summarize paper", pastes an arXiv/AlphaXiv URL, or provides a bare arXiv ID for quick understanding - not for broad literature search.

Data, AI & Research|v1|Updated 7/2/2026|GitHub source

MCP get_skill({ skillId: "alphaxiv-d49cc0c3" })

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# AlphaXiv Paper Lookup

Lookup paper: $ARGUMENTS

> Quick single-paper reader with tiered source fallback (overview → full markdown → LaTeX source). Powered by [AlphaXiv](https://alphaxiv.org).

## Role & Positioning

This skill is the **quick single-paper reader** that returns LLM-optimized summaries:

| Skill | Source | Best for |
|-------|--------|----------|
| `/arxiv` | arXiv API | Batch search, PDF download, metadata |
| `/deepxiv` | DeepXiv SDK | Progressive section-level reading |
| `/semantic-scholar` | S2 API | Published venue metadata, citation counts |
| **`/alphaxiv`** | **alphaxiv.org** | **Instant LLM-optimized summary of one paper, with LaTeX source fallback** |

**Do NOT use this skill for** topic discovery, broad literature search, or multi-paper surveys — use `/research-lit` or `/arxiv` instead.

## Constants

- **OVERVIEW_URL** = `https://alphaxiv.org/overview/{PAPER_ID}.md`
- **ABS_URL** = `https://alphaxiv.org/abs/{PAPER_ID}.md`
- **ARXIV_SRC_URL** = `https://arxiv.org/src/{PAPER_ID}`
- **ALPHAXIV_UA** = `Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/124.0.0.0 Safari/537.36` — any modern browser UA works; update the version numbers if AlphaXiv starts blocking this value again

> Overrides (append to arguments):
> - `/alphaxiv 2401.12345` — quick overview
> - `/alphaxiv "https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.12345"` — auto-extract ID
> - `/alphaxiv 2401.12345 - depth: src` — force LaTeX source inspection
> - `/alphaxiv 2401.12345 - depth: abs` — force full markdown

## Workflow

### Step 1: Parse Arguments & Extract Paper ID

Parse `$ARGUMENTS` to extract a bare arXiv paper ID. Accept these input formats:

- `https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.12345` or `https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.12345v2`
- `https://arxiv.org/pdf/2401.12345`
- `https://alphaxiv.org/overview/2401.12345`
- `https://alphaxiv.org/abs/2401.12345`
- `2401.12345` or `2401.12345v2`

Strip version suffixes (`v1`, `v2`, ...) for API calls. Store as `PAPER_ID`.

Parse optional directives:
- **`- depth: overview|abs|src`**: force a specific tier instead of cascading

### Step 2: Fetch AlphaXiv Overview (Tier 1 — Fastest)

Continue reading

#broad-capability#wanshuiyin-aris#ml-research#autonomous#literature#reviewcurltar