arXiv searches now find the paper you asked for. Free text used to be pasted straight into arXiv's query language, where a phrase quietly became a loose word match: asking about instruction adherence in agent config files returned 124,103 papers with an unrelated one first. The retriever now composes the query properly and widens it only as far as it must, returning 97 matches with the right paper at the top — and it tells you which attempt produced them, so you can see when a match was loose.
You can ask arXiv precise questions. Search by title, author, abstract or category, combine them, sort by newest or by relevance, and restrict to a submission-date window. If you already know arXiv's own query syntax, pass it through untouched.
Fetch one paper exactly, instead of searching for it. Give the retriever an arXiv identifier or a link and it returns that record — including papers from before 2015 and the older slashed identifiers — with its abstract, authors, categories, DOI and journal reference where arXiv publishes them. Ask for the full text and you get named sections within a stated budget rather than a whole paper.
A paper's submission date and its revision date are now separate. The previous version showed only one, so a 2017 paper revised in 2023 could be read as a 2023 paper.
Rate limits no longer end a research session. Requests are spaced and retried, so the retriever keeps working where it previously became unavailable mid-investigation.