Paper2Code: Automating Code Generation from Scientific Papers
11 comments
·April 25, 2025somethingsome
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
tomrod
> we will have a huge quantity of vibe coded code on github
That may actually be an improvement over much of the code that is generated for papers.
colkassad
It would be neat to run their pdf through their implementation[1] and compare results.
endofreach
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.
omneity
If I was the paper author I would have done it and include the results as an appendix or a repo.
JackYoustra
haha would that itself be a product of the paper then?
sitkack
I have had good results doing bidirectional programming in Tex <=> Python.
bjourne
It relies on OpenAI's o3-mini model which (I think) you have to pay for.
So who has a code2paper model that we can hook up in a loop?