Do Agents Need a New Kind of Paper? SPRA: Structured Paper Representation for Agents

Yutong Leng, Haojiong Chen, Fukai Shang, Xiaoyang Wang, Mindong Liu +2

Scientific agents must connect research problems, methods, and findings dispersed through narrative articles. We introduce SPRA (Structured Paper Representation for Agents), a paper-level representation of persistent research objects and typed relations. Its empirical-AI profile organizes Problems, Contributions, Components, ExperimentSetups, Measures, and Findings for querying, traversal, and reuse. Selected paper-level citation relations record dependencies, component use, and comparisons with prior work; source locations support verification. We instantiate SPRA across more than one million AI papers, with 19.95 million research units and 24.07 million internal relations. Evaluations access SPRA through Schema-RAG with task evidence fixed before inference. Across seven subfields, SPRA improves source-conditioned scientific QA by 0.381/5 over passage retrieval while remaining close to Full Compact (0.078/5 lower on average). In directed cross-paper reasoning, qualification improves by 0.184/5 over passage retrieval; Top-5 synthesis shows mixed quality effects. Across all paired RQ2 tasks, including Top-5, input+output tokens decrease by 28.5% relative to passage retrieval and…