Paper Slides: From Paper to Conference Talk

Generate conference presentation slides from: $ARGUMENTS

Context

This skill runs after Workflow 3 (/paper-writing). It takes a compiled paper and generates a presentation slide deck for conference oral talks, spotlight presentations, or poster lightning talks.

Unlike posters (single page, visual-first), slides tell a temporal story: each slide builds on the previous one, with progressive revelation of the research narrative. A good talk makes the audience understand why this matters before showing what was done.

Constants

• VENUE = NeurIPS — Target venue, determines color scheme. Supported: NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, AAAI, ACL, EMNLP, CVPR, ECCV, GENERIC. Override via argument.
• TALK_TYPE = spotlight — Talk format. Options: oral (15-20 min), spotlight (5-8 min), poster-talk (3-5 min), invited (30-45 min). Determines slide count and content depth.
• TALK_MINUTES = 15 — Talk duration in minutes. Auto-adjusts slide count (~1 slide/minute for oral, ~1.5 slides/minute for spotlight). Override explicitly if needed.
• ASPECT_RATIO = 16:9 — Slide aspect ratio. Options: 16:9 (default, modern projectors), 4:3 (legacy).
• SPEAKER_NOTES = true — Generate \note{} blocks in beamer and corresponding PPTX notes. Set false for clean slides without notes.
• PAPER_DIR = paper/ — Directory containing the compiled paper.
• OUTPUT_DIR = slides/ — Output directory for all slide files.
• REVIEWER_MODEL = gpt-5.5 — Model used via Codex MCP for slide review.
• AUTO_PROCEED = false — At each checkpoint, always wait for explicit user confirmation.
• COMPILER = latexmk — LaTeX build tool.
• ENGINE = pdflatex — LaTeX engine. Use xelatex for CJK text.

💡 Override: /paper-slides "paper/" — talk_type: oral, venue: ICML, minutes: 20, aspect: 4:3

Optional: Style reference (— style-ref: <source>, opt-in)

Lets the user steer the talk's structural rhythm (story beats, theorem density, figure density inherited from the source paper) toward a reference paper. Default OFF — when the user does not pass — style-ref, do nothing differently from before.

Only when — style-ref: <source> appears in $ARGUMENTS, run the helper FIRST:

# Resolve $STYLE_HELPER via the canonical strict-safe chain (see
# shared-references/integration-contract.md §2). Policy A — gate:
# unresolved helper means --style-ref cannot be satisfied, so abort.
cd "$(git rev-parse --show-toplevel 2>/dev/null || pwd)" || exit 1
if [ -z "${ARIS_REPO:-}" ] && [ -f .aris/installed-skills.txt ]; then
    ARIS_REPO=$(awk -F'\t' '$1=="repo_root"{print $2; exit}' .aris/installed-skills.txt 2>/dev/null) || true
fi
STYLE_HELPER=".aris/tools/extract_paper_style.py"
[ -f "$STYLE_HELPER" ] || STYLE_HELPER="tools/extract_paper_style.py"
[ -f "$STYLE_HELPER" ] || { [ -n "${ARIS_REPO:-}" ] && STYLE_HELPER="$ARIS_REPO/tools/extract_paper_style.py"; }
[ -f "$STYLE_HELPER" ] || {
  echo "ERROR: extract_paper_style.py not resolved at .aris/tools/, tools/, or \$ARIS_REPO/tools/." >&2
  echo "       Fix: rerun bash tools/install_aris.sh, export ARIS_REPO, or copy the helper to tools/." >&2
  echo "       --style-ref cannot be satisfied; aborting." >&2
  exit 1
}
STYLE_STATUS=0
CACHE=$(python3 "$STYLE_HELPER" --source "<source>") || STYLE_STATUS=$?
case "$STYLE_STATUS" in
  0) ;;                                       # use $CACHE/style_profile.md as structural guidance
  2) echo "warning: style-ref skipped (missing optional dep)" >&2 ;;
  3) echo "error: --style-ref source failed; aborting slides" >&2 ; exit 1 ;;
  *) echo "error: helper failed unexpectedly; aborting slides" >&2 ; exit 1 ;;
esac

Sources accepted: local TeX dir / file, local PDF, arXiv id, http(s) URL. Overleaf URLs/IDs are rejected — clone via /overleaf-sync setup <id> first and pass the local clone path.

Strict rules (full contract in tools/extract_paper_style.py docstring):

• Use style_profile.md to align section-budget tendency and theorem-environment density. Talk-type slide count above still takes precedence.
• Never copy speaker-note prose, slide titles, or examples from anything reachable through the cache. The talk content is from the user's paper, not the reference.
• Never pass — style-ref (or the cache contents) to the GPT-5.5 reviewer sub-agent — the reviewer must judge the talk's clarity on its own merits.

Talk Type → Slide Count

Venue Color Schemes

Same as /paper-poster:

State Persistence (Compact Recovery)

Persist state to slides/SLIDES_STATE.json after each phase:

{
  "phase": 3,
  "venue": "NeurIPS",
  "talk_type": "spotlight",
  "slide_count": 10,
  "codex_thread_id": "019cfcf4-...",
  "status": "in_progress",
  "timestamp": "2026-03-18T15:00:00"
}

On startup: if SLIDES_STATE.json exists with "status": "in_progress" and within 24h → resume. Otherwise → fresh start.

Workflow

Phase 0: Input Validation & Setup

1. Check prerequisites:

   which pdflatex && which latexmk
   

2. Verify paper exists:

   ls $PAPER_DIR/main.tex || ls $PAPER_DIR/main.pdf
   ls $PAPER_DIR/sections/*.tex
   ls $PAPER_DIR/figures/
   

3. Backup existing slides: if slides/ exists, copy to slides-backup-{timestamp}/

4. Create output directory: mkdir -p slides/figures

5. Detect CJK: if paper contains Chinese/Japanese/Korean, set ENGINE to xelatex

6. Determine slide count: from TALK_TYPE and TALK_MINUTES using the table above

7. Check for resume: read slides/SLIDES_STATE.json if it exists

State: Write SLIDES_STATE.json with phase: 0.

Phase 1: Content Extraction & Slide Outline

Read paper/sections/*.tex and build a slide-by-slide outline.

Slide template by talk type:

Oral (15-22 slides)

Spotlight (8-12 slides)

Poster-talk (5-8 slides)