{"ID":2890318,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.18945","arxiv_id":"2507.18945","title":"TreeReader: A Hierarchical Academic Paper Reader Powered by Language Models","abstract":"Efficiently navigating and understanding academic papers is crucial for scientific progress. Traditional linear formats like PDF and HTML can cause cognitive overload and obscure a paper's hierarchical structure, making it difficult to locate key information. While LLM-based chatbots offer summarization, they often lack nuanced understanding of specific sections, may produce unreliable information, and typically discard the document's navigational structure. Drawing insights from a formative study on academic reading practices, we introduce TreeReader, a novel language model-augmented paper reader. TreeReader decomposes papers into an interactive tree structure where each section is initially represented by an LLM-generated concise summary, with underlying details accessible on demand. This design allows users to quickly grasp core ideas, selectively explore sections of interest, and verify summaries against the source text. A user study was conducted to evaluate TreeReader's impact on reading efficiency and comprehension. TreeReader provides a more focused and efficient way to navigate and understand complex academic literature by bridging hierarchical summarization with interactive exploration.","short_abstract":"Efficiently navigating and understanding academic papers is crucial for scientific progress. Traditional linear formats like PDF and HTML can cause cognitive overload and obscure a paper's hierarchical structure, making it difficult to locate key information. While LLM-based chatbots offer summarization, they often lac...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.18945","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.18945v1","authors":"[\"Zijian Zhang\",\"Pan Chen\",\"Fangshi Du\",\"Runlong Ye\",\"Oliver Huang\",\"Michael Liut\",\"Alán Aspuru-Guzik\"]","published":"2025-07-25T04:31:09Z","proceeding":"cs.HC","tasks":"[\"cs.HC\",\"cs.AI\",\"cs.CL\"]","methods":"[\"Large Language Model\",\"Language Model\",\"LoRA\"]","has_code":false}