paper-diff

A comparison tool for checking whether a computer simulation reproduces the figures from a research paper. It compares the original and rendered images and records matching, missing, and extra visual features.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it after generating and running a simulation to compare exported frames with the paper’s reference figures and create a structured difference report.
Why use it?
It provides evidence for whether a simulation matches the paper instead of relying on a visual impression or an invented similarity claim.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/leventilo/mobius/paper-diff
Any agent
npx skills add leventilo/mobius --skill paper-diff
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/leventilo/mobius

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 87 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,804 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00087 $0.03804
Opus 5 $0.00044 $0.01902
Sonnet 5 $0.00017 $0.00761
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00380

Measured yesterday against content hash 576ac96e76ac, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

paper-diff scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured yesterday.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/run_diff.py), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/paper-diff/SKILL.md · 233 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 233 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

paper-diff

1. Purpose and scope

This skill produces the user-facing comparison artifact between the figures of the source paper and the rendered output of a Mobius simulation. It is the visible evidence that the simulation reproduces the physics described in the paper. Its product backs the green "reproduces Figure 3" badge surfaced near the simulator and the side-by-side panel that opens when a user clicks the badge.

The skill runs after primitive-generator has emitted Python code, after the simulation has executed in the Claude Managed Agents sandbox, and after at least one frame per relevant figure has been exported. It runs before the orchestrator pitches the final assembled simulator. It does not run during the live slider loop; the diff is computed once per stable simulation snapshot and cached.

What this skill does NOT do. It does not extract figures from the paper PDF (that is paper-parser), does not decide whether to block the pipeline (that is science-integrity), does not render the side-by-side panels in the browser (that is viz-mapper), and does not invent ground-truth values.

2. Distinction from science-integrity.figure_diff

Load-bearing. Both skills compare images but serve orthogonal purposes.

science-integrity.figure_diff is one of the five deterministic integrity checks (units, CFL, conservation, figure-diff, claim-match). It returns pass | warn | fail, writes into simspec.integrity.checks[], and on fail blocks the pipeline so the orchestrator re-dispatches primitive-generator. It is silent on the user surface.

paper-diff is the user-facing report. It returns a rich structured object enumerating matched features, missing features, spurious features, color and axis agreement, and surviving numerical claims. It is always rendered in the UI and never blocks. Even on catastrophic disagreement, the simulator renders with a red "divergent" badge and a panel listing every divergence verbatim. The bet: an honest "this does not match Figure 3 because the simulation produced 2 peaks where the paper shows 4" is more valuable to a user and a judge than a silently downgraded match.

Read the full file on GitHub · 233 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. yesterday First seen · 233 lines · 87 tokens per session scan A 576ac96e76ac

Subscribe to this mod's changes

paper-diff is a skill published in the GitHub repository leventilo/mobius (9 stars, last pushed 4mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 87 tokens to every session and 3,804 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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