FutureHouse Researchers Propose Aviary: An Extensible Open-Source Gymnasium for Language Agents

Artificial intelligence (AI) has made significant strides in developing language models capable of solving complex problems. However, applying these models to real-world scientific challenges remains difficult. Many AI agents struggle with tasks requiring multiple cycles of observation, reasoning, and action. Moreover, existing models often lack the ability to integrate tools effectively or maintain consistency in multi-step reasoning. These issues are particularly pressing in scientific domains, where tasks demand precision, adaptability, and computational efficiency. Addressing these problems requires a flexible and practical framework for training and deploying language agents.

Introducing Aviary: An Extensible Open-Source Gymnasium

A team of researchers from FutureHouse Inc., the University of Rochester, and the Francis Crick Institute has introduced Aviary, an open-source gymnasium for language agents. Aviary addresses the limitations of existing frameworks by introducing language decision processes (LDPs), which model tasks as partially observable Markov decision processes grounded in natural language. This approach enables language agents to effectively handle complex, multi-step reasoning tasks.

Aviary includes five environments, three of which are designed for advanced scientific tasks:

1. Molecular Cloning: Manipulating DNA constructs using tools for sequence annotation and protocol planning.
2. Scientific Literature QA: Retrieving and analyzing scientific literature to answer detailed research questions.
3. Protein Stability Engineering: Proposing protein mutations to improve stability with the help of computational and biochemical tools.

These tasks make Aviary a valuable platform for training and evaluating language agents in real-world scenarios requiring reasoning, tool integration, and iterative learning.

Technical Insights and Benefits of Aviary

Aviary uses a stochastic computation graph framework to model language agents, enabling flexible and efficient optimization. Key features include:

• Expert Iteration (EI): A training method that iteratively refines agents using high-quality trajectories.
• Majority Voting: A technique to improve accuracy by combining multiple inference outputs without excessive computational overhead.
• Tool Integration: Built-in support for tools like sequence annotators and literature retrieval systems, enhancing real-world applicability.

The researchers show that non-frontier, open-source models like Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct can achieve performance comparable to or better than frontier models (e.g., Claude 3.5 Sonnet) in these environments. Additionally, these models operate at significantly lower inference costs, making them accessible for large-scale scientific applications.

Results and Insights

Aviary-trained agents demonstrate impressive performance:

• On molecular cloning tasks, the Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct agent showed notable accuracy improvements through EI and behavior cloning, outperforming human experts on SeqQA benchmarks.
• In scientific literature QA tasks, the same model achieved performance levels on par with or better than humans, while maintaining efficiency.
• Majority voting further enhanced accuracy, with SeqQA results reaching 89% after sampling multiple trajectories, surpassing human and frontier model benchmarks.

Conclusion

Aviary represents a thoughtful advancement in the development of language AI agents. By demonstrating that open-source, non-frontier models can excel in scientific tasks, Aviary opens new possibilities for accessible and cost-effective AI research. Its open-source design encourages collaboration, enabling researchers and developers to refine and extend its applications further.

With tools and training methods tailored for real-world challenges, Aviary sets a benchmark for how language agents can address complex tasks. It provides a compelling framework for advancing AI-driven scientific exploration and practical problem-solving.

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