[NielsRogge]

Problem

Papers With Code methods are general techniques reused across many papers. Chat agents often call get_method for a specific model or system (ViLT, BLIP-2, GSConv), miss, and then spend a second call on search_papers. In production chat from 2026-10-20 to 10-27, 140 of 297 get_method calls missed (47%), and 100 of those turns fell back to a paper lookup afterwards.

huggingface/paperswithcode#752 already tells the chat model that specific models are papers. In an offline probe, model-name method lookups dropped from 100% to 19–38%, but some still slip through. This PR makes those remaining misses useful.

Change

• Matching papers on a miss. A get_method "Method not found" miss now runs one keyword paper search for the same name and appends the top three hits:
  not_found: Method not found: ViLT; closest results: ViT, CLIP; papers matching it (likely a model or system, not a method): ViLT: Vision-and-Language Transformer Without Convolution… (paper 2102.03334); …
• Fits the chat error cap. Titles are cut at a word boundary to 60 characters, so the message stays within the ~400 characters the chat client keeps.
• Fails safe. A failed or empty search keeps the original error unchanged, and other errors are untouched.
• No extra rate-limit pressure. keyword mode keeps this lookup off the semantic-search rate limit.
• Docs and version. SKILL.md's get_method line says a miss lists papers and to call get_paper_info with one of their IDs. Releases pwc-mcp 0.2.12.

Validation

• uv run --group dev pytest -q tests/ in mcp_server: 91 passed. New tests cover:
  • hits appended, with the search run in keyword mode, limit 3;
  • long titles staying within the 400-character budget;
  • a failed search (invalid JSON or 429) keeping the plain error;
  • empty results keeping the plain error.
• ruff check is clean on the changed files.

Rollout

Production picks this up with an MCP component deploy:

sudo pwc-deploy production <sha> --component mcp --confirm DEPLOY_PRODUCTION

The chat app vendors SKILL.md as PWC_MCP_SKILL.md. Re-vendoring is optional, since the error text itself carries the instruction.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

[NielsRogge]

LIVE on the production MCP component as 125ffe0 (pwc-mcp 0.2.12, 2026-10-27). Verified with real misses: ViLT → paper 4996 (ViLT, arXiv 2102.03334) listed first, which get_paper_info resolves; BLIP-2 → paper 12644. Miss messages are about 340 characters, and 'transformer' still resolves as a method. The public paperswithcode.co/mcp endpoint returns the same.