Arxivum

What it does

• Search arXiv and import papers into a local library with one tool call.

• Enrich every paper with citation counts, venue, and impact data from Semantic Scholar. Free, no API key required.

• Summarise papers into structured sections: problem statement, methodology, findings, ablations, discussion, limitations, and an overall assessment. Generated by a local LLM.

• Generate ideas grounded in each paper's constraints, assumptions, and inductive biases. Each idea includes suggested search queries for novelty verification.

• Verify novelty by checking generated ideas against your local library and arXiv. The LLM judges overlap and returns a verdict: likely novel, needs review, or similar exists.

• Query the library with hybrid vector + metadata retrieval and cross-encoder reranking for precise results.

• Supervise everything through a visual web panel. Inspect papers, approve or reject ideas, and watch every agent action in real time.

Everything runs on your CPU or a small GPU. No cloud LLM calls. No data leaves your machine.

Related MCP server: paper-mcp

Quick start

1. Install

git clone <repo>
cd arxivum
python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -e ".[dev,llm]"

On Windows, activate the venv with .venv\Scripts\activate instead.

The [llm] extra installs llama-cpp-python, which needs CMake and a C++ compiler. On Windows, install Visual Studio Build Tools first. Without [llm], everything works except local LLM generation (summaries, ideas, novelty checks). You can still search, import, enrich, and query the library.

2. Configure

cp .env.example .env

Edit .env and add your HF_TOKEN. This is used only for downloading models from Hugging Face Hub. No remote inference is performed.

3. Download models (~1.5 GB)

python scripts/download_models.py

This downloads BGE embedding and reranker models (cached by sentence-transformers) and Qwen2.5-1.5B-Instruct GGUF (Q4_K_M, ~1 GB) for local LLM inference.

4. Initialise the database

python scripts/migrate.py

5. Run

MCP server for coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Freebuff):

python -m src.mcp_server

Communicates over stdio by default. Set MCP_TRANSPORT=sse in .env for SSE mode.

Web API + visual panel for human supervision:

python -m src.api.main

• Visual panel: http://localhost:8000

• Demo page: http://localhost:8000/demo

• API docs: http://localhost:8000/docs

MCP tools

The server exposes nine tools, all prefixed with research_:

Configuration

All settings come from environment variables loaded from .env. See .env.example for the full list and defaults. Key options:

Testing

pytest

Unit, component, and integration tests. Mocked and offline. Runs in ~3 seconds.

Smoke tests require real models and network access. Run them after downloading models:

pytest tests/smoke/ -v -s

How it works

Coding Agent ──MCP stdio──▶ MCP Server ──▶ arXiv API + Semantic Scholar
                                │
                    FastAPI + Visual Panel
                                │
                ┌───────────────┴───────────────┐
            ChromaDB                        SQLite
         (vectors)                     (metadata/ideas)
                                │
              llama-cpp-python (Qwen2.5-1.5B GGUF)
              sentence-transformers (BGE embed/rerank)

Retrieval pipeline:

1. arXiv search results are imported into SQLite (metadata) and ChromaDB (vector embeddings of abstracts and titles).

2. Semantic Scholar enrichment adds citation counts and venue data.

3. Generated summary sections are also indexed as vector chunks for fine-grained RAG retrieval.

4. Library queries use hybrid vector search with metadata pre-filtering, followed by cross-encoder reranking for precision.

Memory management: On constrained machines, only one heavy model (embedder, reranker, or LLM) is resident at a time. The model manager automatically unloads the previous model before loading the next.

Scope

This is a local-only POC. All models, databases, and services run on the user's machine. Cloud and HPC scaling is future work.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.