Cat Yan

Ed Li, Junyu Ren, Xintian Pan et al.

The automation of scientific discovery represents a critical milestone in Artificial Intelligence (AI) research. However, existing agentic systems for science suffer from two fundamental limitations: rigid, pre-programmed workflows that cannot adapt to intermediate findings, and inadequate context management that hinders long-horizon research. We present \texttt{freephdlabor}, an open-source multiagent framework featuring \textit{fully dynamic workflows} determined by real-time agent reasoning and a \coloremph{\textit{modular architecture}} enabling seamless customization -- users can modify, add, or remove agents to address domain-specific requirements. The framework provides comprehensive infrastructure including \textit{automatic context compaction}, \textit{workspace-based communication} to prevent information degradation, \textit{memory persistence} across sessions, and \textit{non-blocking human intervention} mechanisms. These features collectively transform automated research from isolated, single-run attempts into \textit{continual research programs} that build systematically on prior explorations and incorporate human feedback. By providing both the architectural principles and practical implementation for building customizable co-scientist systems, this work aims to facilitate broader adoption of automated research across scientific domains, enabling practitioners to deploy interactive multiagent systems that autonomously conduct end-to-end research -- from ideation through experimentation to publication-ready manuscripts.

Ed Li, Junyu Ren, Cat Yan

While multiagent systems have shown promise for tackling complex tasks via specialization, finetuning multiple agents simultaneously faces two key challenges: (1) credit assignment across agents, and (2) sample efficiency of expensive multiagent rollouts. In this work, we propose finetuning multiagent systems with per-action process rewards from AI feedback (MAPPA) to address both. Through assigning credit to individual agent actions rather than only at task completion, MAPPA enables fine-grained supervision without ground truth labels while extracting maximal training signal from each rollout. We demonstrate our approach on competition math problems and tool-augmented data analysis tasks. On unseen math problems, MAPPA achieves +5.0--17.5pp on AIME and +7.8--17.2pp on AMC. For data analysis tasks, our method improves success rate by +16.7pp while quality metrics improve by up to 47%, validating that per-action supervision can lead to improvements across different multiagent systems on various domains. By addressing these challenges, our work takes a first step toward scaling multiagent systems for complex, long-horizon tasks with minimal human supervision.