Open Source Planning & Control System with Language Agents for Autonomous Scientific Discovery

We present a multi-agent system for automation of scientific research tasks, cmbagent. The system is formed by about 30 Large Language Model (LLM) agents and implements a Planning & Control strategy to orchestrate the agentic workflow, with no human-in-the-loop at any point. Each agent specializes in a different task (performing retrieval on scientific papers and codebases, writing code, interpreting results, critiquing the output of other agents) and the system is able to execute code locally. We successfully apply cmbagent to carry out a PhD level cosmology task (the measurement of cosmological parameters using supernova data) and evaluate its performance on two benchmark sets, finding superior performance over state-of-the-art LLMs. The source code is available on GitHub, demonstration videos are also available, and the system is deployed on HuggingFace and will be available on the cloud.

Evaluating Retrieval-Augmented Generation Agents for Autonomous Scientific Discovery in Astrophysics

We evaluate 9 Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) agent configurations on 105 Cosmology Question-Answer (QA) pairs that we built specifically for this purpose.The RAG configurations are manually evaluated by a human expert, that is, a total of 945 generated answers were assessed. We find that currently the best RAG agent configuration is with OpenAI embedding and generative model, yielding 91.4\% accuracy. Using our human evaluation results we calibrate LLM-as-a-Judge (LLMaaJ) system which can be used as a robust proxy for human evaluation. These results allow us to systematically select the best RAG agent configuration for multi-agent system for autonomous scientific discovery in astrophysics (e.g., cmbagent presented in a companion paper) and provide us with an LLMaaJ system that can be scaled to thousands of cosmology QA pairs. We make our QA dataset, human evaluation results, RAG pipelines, and LLMaaJ system publicly available for further use by the astrophysics community.