ArXiv submission and LaTeX compilation ArXiv expects (La)TeX sources to be submitted rather than a PDF. But - if you build a document on a different system - different TeX distribution with different updates - you are not guaranteed to get exactly the same result. Worse than that - some packages/functionality which you're using may be missing.

How, then, should I approach making sure my (hopefully upcoming) ArXiv upload actually build and produce as little divergence from the version I build at home?
Upload the libraries that you use, along with your LaTeX source. This will ensure that your system and arXiv are compiling your source using the same libraries (rather than different versions of the libraries), which should ensure similar results (any remaining differences are due to the compilation process).

This solution bloats the upload to arXiv. Bloat can be partly avoided by only uploading troublesome libraries. Alternatively, you could try specifying versions of packages.