Paper2Code: Automating Code Generation from Scientific Papers
(arxiv.org)109 points by Jerry2 15 hours ago
109 points by Jerry2 15 hours ago
I like the idea of having automatic code creation from papers, but I’m scared of it.
Suppose you get a paper, you automatically implement the code, and then modify it a bit with a novel idea, and publish your paper. Then somebody else does that with your paper, and does the same.. at some point, we will have a huge quantity of vibe coded code on github, and two similar papers will have very different underlying implementations, so hard to reason about and hard to change.
From a learning perspective, you try to understand the code, and it's all spaghetti, and you loose more time understanding the code than it would take to just reimplement it. You also learn a lot by not only reading the paper but reading the authors code where most of the small details reside.
And I'm not even talking about the reliability of the code, test to know that it's the correct implementation. Authors try to make papers as close as possible to the implementation but sometimes subtle steps are removed, sometimes from inadvertance, sometimes because the number of pages is lionmited.
A paper and an implementation are not one-to-one mappings
Very interesting, do you have a specific approach to educate them in how to use LLMs? Or they do it free wheel? Do you give advices? If so which kind?
I would love to have a structured approach to help students learn to use better LLMs. What I have observed (for uni students) is that they produce better code overall, but have no idea how it works, and would not be able to reproduce it without LLMs. (this is from first to last year)
> you try to understand the code, and it's all spaghetti, and you loose more time understanding the code than it would take to just reimplement it.
I agree with you in general, but maybe the jump would be similar to the one from hand-written punchcards/assembly to higher level compilers. Very few people worry about the asm generated from GHC for example. So maybe a lot of code would be like that. I also imagine at some point a better intermediate language for LLMs to generate will be discovered and suddenly that's how most programs will be written.
It would be neat to run their pdf through their implementation[1] and compare results.
I decided to do that, and made Paper2Code2Code: https://github.com/alexyorke/Paper2Code2Code/tree/main
Damn, i was hoping the link was your result of that. Please do that. I can't start another project currently. But i'd love the short result as an anecdote. But if you don't do it, i might have to. Please let me know. Great idea, really.
Not what OP is about, but idea I just had:
We should have the technology now to hand-write pseudocode on a piece of paper (or whiteboard or chalkboard), and have it translated and executed. Maybe you even hook up a projector, and project the output back onto the board
I did this recently with a forward-mode AD paper, by just pasting the PDF into Claude. Like everyone, I've had mixed results with Claude coding, so I wouldn't bet my life on the output, but Claude was able to produce something for Pytorch that worked first go, had appropriate performance characteristics, and it was able to convincingly explain the connection between parts of the generated code and the paper. I was impressed.