Authors: Siddharth Narayanan, James D. Braza, Ryan-Rhys Griffiths, Manu Ponnapati, Albert Bou, Jon Laurent, Ori Kabeli, Geemi Wellawatte, Sam Cox, Samuel G. Rodriques, Andrew D. White
Abstract: Solving complex real-world tasks requires cycles of actions and observations.
This is particularly true in science, where tasks require many cycles of
analysis, tool use, and experimentation. Language agents are promising for
automating intellectual tasks in science because they can interact with tools
via natural language or code. Yet their flexibility creates conceptual and
practical challenges for software implementations, since agents may comprise
non-standard components such as internal reasoning, planning, tool usage, as
well as the inherent stochasticity of temperature-sampled language models.
Here, we introduce Aviary, an extensible gymnasium for language agents. We
formalize agents as policies solving language-grounded partially observable
Markov decision processes, which we term language decision processes. We then
implement five environments, including three challenging scientific
environments: (1) manipulating DNA constructs for molecular cloning, (2)
answering research questions by accessing scientific literature, and (3)
engineering protein stability. These environments were selected for their focus
on multi-step reasoning and their relevance to contemporary biology research.
Finally, with online training and scaling inference-time compute, we show that
language agents backed by open-source, non-frontier LLMs can match and exceed
both frontier LLM agents and human experts on multiple tasks at up to 100x
lower inference cost.
Source: http://arxiv.org/abs/2412.21154v1
