Autonomous Research Agents

Build research agents that autonomously explore and discover

Building Your Research Agent

A production research agent needs four core components: orchestrator (workflow coordination), search manager (multi-source discovery), content extractor (information extraction), and report generator (synthesis). Here's production-ready code.

Interactive: Code Explorer

Explore each research agent component:

🎯
Research Orchestrator
Main agent that coordinates research workflow
class ResearchOrchestrator:
    """Coordinates autonomous research workflow"""
    
    def __init__(self, tools: ToolRegistry):
        self.tools = tools
        self.state = ResearchState()
        self.max_iterations = 5
        
    async def research(self, topic: str, 
                      depth: str = 'comprehensive') -> Report:
        """Execute autonomous research on topic"""
        
        # Initialize research state
        self.state.topic = topic
        self.state.questions = self._generate_questions(topic)
        
        # Research loop
        for iteration in range(self.max_iterations):
            print(f"Research Iteration {iteration + 1}/{self.max_iterations}")
            
            # Phase 1: Search for answers
            sources = await self._search_phase()
            
            # Phase 2: Extract information
            findings = await self._extract_phase(sources)
            
            # Phase 3: Synthesize insights
            insights = await self._synthesize_phase(findings)
            
            # Phase 4: Decide whether to continue
            if self._should_conclude(insights):
                break
            
            # Generate follow-up questions for next iteration
            self.state.questions = self._generate_followup_questions(
                insights
            )
        
        # Generate final report
        report = await self._generate_report()
        return report
    
    def _should_conclude(self, insights: List[Insight]) -> bool:
        """Decide if research is complete"""
        # Check confidence level
        avg_confidence = np.mean([i.confidence for i in insights])
        if avg_confidence < 0.8:
            return False
        
        # Check coverage (all questions answered?)
        answered = sum(1 for q in self.state.questions if q.answered)
        coverage = answered / len(self.state.questions)
        
        return coverage >= 0.9  # 90% questions answered

Complete Usage Example

# Setup research agent
tools = ToolRegistry()
tools.register('search', SearchManager([
    PubMedAPI(),
    ArXivAPI(),
    GoogleScholarAPI()
]))
tools.register('extract', ContentExtractor(PDFParser(), GPT4()))
tools.register('report', ReportGenerator(GPT4()))

agent = ResearchOrchestrator(tools)

# Run research
print("Starting autonomous research...")
report = await agent.research(
    topic="CRISPR off-target effects in human therapies",
    depth="comprehensive"
)

# Results
print(f"\nResearch Complete!")
print(f"Sources analyzed: {report.metadata['sources_analyzed']}")
print(f"Duration: {report.metadata['research_duration']}")
print(f"Confidence: {report.metadata['confidence_score']:.1%}")

# Save report
report.save_as_pdf('crispr_research_report.pdf')
report.save_as_markdown('crispr_research_report.md')

# Example output:
# Research Complete!
# Sources analyzed: 87
# Duration: 6.3 hours
# Confidence: 89%
💡
Deployment Strategy

Week 1: Build orchestrator with basic search (1-2 APIs). Test on simple topics.
Week 2: Add content extraction. Extract from top 10 papers. Verify quality.
Week 3: Add synthesis and report generation. Generate first end-to-end report.
Week 4+: Scale to 50+ sources. Add caching, parallelization. Run on production topics.

Cost: $50-200 per comprehensive research project (10K-50K LLM tokens, API calls). ROI: 5-10x faster than human researcher.

Tool Integration