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Research Rabbit Hole Team: 3-Agent Paper Crawler, Summarizer, Citation Tracker

A 3-agent crew for AI/ML researchers and curious devs โ€” crawls arXiv/Semantic Scholar, summarizes papers in your domain, tracks citations and follow-ups.

Staying current in a fast-moving research field โ€” large-language-model interpretability, retrieval-augmented generation, biology + AI โ€” means reading 5-10 papers per week, every week. The standard tooling (Connected Papers, arXiv RSS, Semantic Scholar alerts) gives you a firehose; what you actually need is a curated trickle plus enough synthesis to know whether the field is moving and where.

This 3-agent research rabbit hole team is the curation + synthesis layer. Scout crawls arXiv and Semantic Scholar for your interest tags and ranks by citation velocity. Notes writes 200-word executive summaries per paper โ€” problem, method, key result, what's missing. Survey synthesizes the week's papers into a domain map: clusters of similar work, who's at the frontier, what gaps look exploitable. You get a Monday digest with the papers worth reading and a snapshot of where the field is. The crew is built for one researcher tracking 1-3 sub-domains in depth, not a literature-review machine for a whole university department.

3
AI Agents
8 min
Setup Time
Easy
Difficulty

Best For

AI/ML researchersAcademic-curious devsDomain experts staying current

How It Works

1

Configure your interest tags (e.g. 'sparse autoencoders', 'long-context retrieval', 'RLHF alternatives').

2

Scout queries arXiv + Semantic Scholar nightly, dedupes against papers you've seen, ranks by citation velocity.

3

Notes generates a 200-word executive summary per paper: problem, method, key result, what's missing.

4

Survey synthesizes the week's papers into a domain map โ€” clusters of similar work, who's at the frontier, gaps.

5

You get a Monday digest in Telegram with the 5-10 papers worth reading and Survey's domain map.

6

If a paper cites work you read 3 months ago, Scout flags it ("this is a follow-up to X you read on date Y").

7

Quarterly: Survey writes a 'state of [topic]' overview pulling threads from the quarter's reading.

Sample Output

Monday research digest (sparse autoencoders, 2026-04-29):
- Scout: 12 new papers indexed (3 arXiv, 9 SemanticScholar). 7 cited >5 times in last 30 days, 5 cited 0-2 times.
- Notes (top 3 summaries):
  โ€ข Anthropic 2026 โ€” "Scaling SAE features to 100M" โ€” pushes feature count 4x prior SOTA, training cost 3x. Key result: feature interpretability degrades non-linearly past ~16M, suggests architectural change needed.
  โ€ข DeepMind 2026 โ€” "SAE features as routing" โ€” uses SAE outputs for MoE expert routing. 2.1% perplexity improvement; orthogonal to interpretability work.
  โ€ข MIT 2026 โ€” "Concept erasure via SAE features" โ€” practical method for unlearning specific concepts; ~6 hr per concept on a 70B model.
- Survey: This week's frontier moved toward 'features as substrate for downstream tasks' (3/12 papers). Anthropic + DeepMind racing on scale; MIT carving an applied niche.
- Action items: read top 3 in full, watch the 'features-as-substrate' thread next week.

Expected Results

โœ“Stay current without drowning in paper firehose
โœ“Domain map updated as the field moves
โœ“Citation chain auto-tracked
โœ“200-word summaries you can actually read

Frequently Asked Questions

How is this different from Connected Papers or Elicit?๏ผ‹

Connected Papers is a graph-traversal UI โ€” great for exploring around a paper you already know. Elicit answers research questions across a corpus. This crew is daily-curation focused: it knows your interest tags, ranks by citation velocity, writes summaries in your voice, and tracks follow-ups across months. Different jobs; we use Connected Papers ourselves alongside this crew.

Where does it pull papers from?๏ผ‹

arXiv (cs.*, stat.ML, q-bio.*, configurable), Semantic Scholar (S2 API), Google Scholar (light scraping with rate-limit respect). You can add custom sources โ€” IEEE, OpenReview, ACL anthology โ€” with a small adapter. The default config is tuned for AI/ML; biology/physics/social-science work fine but may need tag tuning.

Will the summaries miss the actual contribution of a paper?๏ผ‹

The default SOUL.md asks Notes to surface 'what's new', 'what's the empirical result', and 'what's missing' โ€” which catches most contributions but can miss nuance in highly mathematical papers. Notes flags 'low confidence' summaries for papers it doesn't fully understand; you read those in full. In our testing on 200 sampled AI/ML papers, the summary correctly identified the main contribution 91% of the time.

Can it handle papers behind paywalls?๏ผ‹

It uses arXiv preprints and S2's open-access copies where available; falls back to abstract-only for paywalled work. If you have institutional access, you can wire your library proxy and the agent will use it. Default is open-access only.

What models work best?๏ผ‹

Notes is the heaviest โ€” Sonnet/Opus class for accurate summaries (Haiku-class will hallucinate confidently). Scout is light, runs fine on Haiku or Llama 3.3. Survey is medium, Sonnet recommended. You set provider per-agent in each SOUL.md.

What does the $19 Starter bundle include?๏ผ‹

Three SOUL.md files (Scout, Survey, Notes), an AGENTS.md coordination file, arXiv + S2 + Scholar adapters, a citation-graph database snippet (SQLite), and the setup README. Drop into your OpenClaw agents/ folder; runs nightly via cron or whenever you trigger a digest.

Deploy This Team

Get 3 AI agents working together โ€” pre-configured, two Terminal commands to deploy.

$19one-time
Starter Bundle ยท includes 3 agents
Save $8 vs $27 for 3 singles

7-day money-back guarantee ยท One-time payment, yours forever