Or maybe in the style of Dr Seuss. Or Shakespeare.

If so, did it work? Asking for a friend...

The date is just an unfortunate coincidence. This is a genuine SIGBOVIK submission and the full working source code is in our arXiv repository.

Web: neuralatex.com
Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2503.24187
Source: arxiv.org/abs/2503.24187 (click "TeX source")

This has been a massively entertaining and challenging side project with @jadgardner.bsky.social and @willrowan.bsky.social over the past year and (subject to rigorous peer review) will be appearing at SIGBOVIK 2025.

@overleaf.com becomes your cloud compute provider. This should level the playing field within the community as both industry and academia will have to work within the same compute limits.

NeuRaLaTeX brings many side benefits. Your paper source code is also your method source code. No more "Code coming soon" on github. If the paper is on arxiv, the paper source link *is* the method source code! No need to remember those silly git commands anymore!

In case your arXiv submission is timing out, we've also implemented checkpointing so you can include your trained model weights as a text file with your paper source.

In a NeuRaLaTeX paper, when you compile your PDF, a neural network is constructed, trained and evaluated with all results and figures generated dynamically. We've worked hard on efficiency and the NeuRaLaTeX paper only took 48 hours to compile.

Our neural network library extends the autograd engine to create neurons, linear layers and MLPs. Constructing an MLP and making a forward pass is as easy as this.

Just like Karpathy's micrograd, NeuRaLaTeX implements backpropagation (reverse-mode autodiff) over a dynamically built DAG. However, while micrograd uses 150 lines of Python, NeuRaLaTeX uses around 1,100 line of pure LaTeX, making it about 700% better.

Not only that, but LaTeX has elegant and intuitive programming syntax. For example, creating a new Value object only uses the word "expand" four times:
\expanded{
\noexpand\pgfoonew\expandafter\noexpand
\csname #2\endcsname=
new Value(\newdata,{\selfid,\otherid},*,0)
}

Wait, what?

Well, LaTeX is itself a Turing-complete programming language. When you "compile" a LaTeX document, really you are executing a program written in LaTeX. This program need not only format your paper contents into a PDF but can also perform useful computation.

On a similar note: if you have two figures one above the other at the top of one column, move one figure to the top of the other column and you gain the white space between them.

I must confess I just immediately copy/pasted the turkey eggs question into ChatGPT to get the answer myself. Great question!

Enjoy! on.soundcloud.com/2ALY7LnJrmiR... 5/5

Of course, we then put our blog post back through the podcast generator! So now its AI podcast hosts talking about our blog post about themselves talking about our research - how meta is that?! They have some minor existential crises as they discuss that they are themselves LLMs. 4/5

On another level, we noticed that it made fundamental mistakes. Often these were wrapped up within clever metaphors that gave a falsely confident impression that it deeply understood the material. We were left wondering what effect a deluge of these accessible but incorrect podcasts might have. 3/5

When NotebookLM launched the podcast feature, we both put our own papers through it and chatted about what we thought of it. On one level, we were blown away by the convincing podcast style and the way it seemed to distill complex research into an accessible form. 2/5