Keystone MCP server

Keystone

What is this paper standing on?

Live: https://keystone-research.vercel.app

No paper stands by itself. Each one adopts a method from somebody, argues with somebody else, and takes a handful of things on faith without flagging them. Keystone reads all three out of the paper's own LaTeX — not a summary, not a retrieval index, no model in the loop — and pins each one to the pixels on the page where the paper says it.

The name is the thesis, and it took a pivot to earn it. A keystone is the one stone an arch collapses without, and for almost every paper that stone belongs to somebody else.

Three things, all quoted rather than inferred:

\cite{ba2016layer} we normalise each layer" and "Unlike \cite{ba2016layer}, we normalise across the batch" are opposite statements about the same paper, and the difference is written down. Every citation site is classified from its cue phrase, and the cue is shown, so the reading is something you can disagree with.

• What it stands on. A citation is not a neutral pointer. "Following

requires it — "we hypothesize", "for simplicity", "it is well known that". Each is quoted next to what the paper offers in the same sentence: a citation, a pointer to its own evidence, or nothing at all.

• What it takes on faith. Authors announce their assumptions because the genre

both directions, so a paper shows both what it stands on and who stands on it. Across 234 papers that is 548 links, each carrying the sentence that placed it, and the chain is the real one: VGG → ResNet → Transformer → BERT / ViT / LLaMA, with batch and layer normalisation feeding in.

• The graph. Where a cited paper is also in the library the edge is walkable in

The library grows along its own citations. keystone expand reads every reference the library already resolves to arXiv, ranks them by how many papers take a stance on each, and fetches the top of that list — so each new paper arrives with at least one edge already attached rather than as an isolated node.

ResNet's central hypothesis — that residual mappings are easier to optimise than

unreferenced ones — is stated once, in the introduction, with nothing offered for it.

Page 2.

And it is often silent, and sometimes wrong. A cue read out of position produces a confident opposite rather than a vague answer, so the error rate is published rather than implied — and measured on somebody else's labels, because a rate measured on the same papers the rules were written against is not a rate, it is a restatement.

Scored against SciCite (11,014 citation contexts, Cohan et al. 2019) and ACL-ARC (1,941, Jurgens et al. 2018), neither of which contributed a single cue phrase:

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.