What Papers Don't Tell You: Recovering Tacit Knowledge for Automated Paper Reproduction
Abstract
Automated paper reproduction -- generating executable code from academic papers -- is bottlenecked not by information retrieval but by the tacit knowledge that papers inevitably leave implicit. We formalize this challenge as the progressive recovery of three types of tacit knowledge -- relational, somatic, and collective -- and propose , a graph-based agent framework with a dedicated mechanism for each: node-level relation-aware aggregation recovers relational knowledge by analyzing implementation-unit-level reuse and adaptation relationships between the target paper and its citation neighbors; execution-feedback refinement recovers somatic knowledge through iterative debugging driven by runtime signals; and graph-level knowledge induction distills collective knowledge from clusters of papers sharing similar implementations. On an extended ReproduceBench spanning 3 domains, 10 tasks, and 40 recent papers, achieves an average performance gap of 10.04\% against official implementations, improving over the strongest baseline by 24.68\%. The code will be publicly released upon acceptance; the repository link will be provided in the final version.
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