ar9av / outline-agent

Outline Agent (Step 1)

Faithful implementation of the Outline Agent from PaperOrchestra
(Song et al., 2026, arXiv:2604.05018, App. F.1, pp. 40–44).

Cost: 1 LLM call.

Your task

Read four input files from the workspace and produce a single JSON object at
workspace/outline.json with three top-level keys:

• plotting_plan — array of figure objects
• intro_related_work_plan — object with introduction_strategy and related_work_strategy
• section_plan — array of section objects, each with section_title and subsections[]

How to do it

1. Read the verbatim prompt at references/prompt.md. This is the exact
   Outline Agent system prompt from the paper. Use it as your system message.

2. Prepend the Anti-Leakage Prompt from
   ../paper-orchestra/references/anti-leakage-prompt.md.

3. Read the four input files:

   • workspace/inputs/idea.md
   • workspace/inputs/experimental_log.md
   • workspace/inputs/template.tex
   • workspace/inputs/conference_guidelines.md

4. Synthesize across all four — the global instruction in the prompt is
   "Do not analyze inputs in isolation. You must synthesize information across
   all provided documents for every step."

5. Emit a single JSON object following the schema in
   references/outline-schema.md. Cross-check against
   references/outline_schema.json (machine-readable).

6. Save to workspace/outline.json.

7. Validate:
   `bash
   python skills/outline-agent/scripts/validate_outline.py workspace/outline.json
   `
   If validation fails, fix the JSON and re-validate. Do not proceed to Step 2
   or Step 3 with an invalid outline — every downstream agent depends on this
   schema.

8. Append §1 to research_brief.md (see skills/shared/research_brief_template.md):

   After outline.json passes validation, append the §1 section to
   workspace/research_brief.md (create the file if absent). Template:

    ## §1 · Core Claim and Narrative
    _Written by: outline-agent, Step 1_
   
    **Core claim:** <one-sentence contribution>
    **Narrative tension:** <gap this paper resolves>
    **Key novelty framing:** <how the contribution is framed relative to prior work>
    **Outline decisions:**
    - Plotting plan: <N> figures
    - Related Work clusters: <names>
    - Section structure: <section titles>
    **Potential weaknesses flagged at outline stage:**
    - <any claim in idea.md that may be hard to support>

   This is a free-form prose append; no machine-readable schema required.

Hard rules from the prompt (do not violate)

These are excerpted from references/prompt.md. The validator enforces them.

Plotting plan (Directive 1)

• plot_type MUST be exactly one of "plot" or "diagram".

• data_source MUST be exactly one of "idea.md", "experimental_log.md",
  or "both".

• aspect_ratio MUST be exactly one of:
  "1:1", "1:4", "2:3", "3:2", "3:4", "4:1", "4:3", "4:5",
  "5:4", "9:16", "16:9", "21:9".

• figure_id MUST be a semantically meaningful snake_case identifier
  (e.g., fig_framework_overview, fig_ablation_study_parameter_sensitivity).

• figure_id MUST NOT contain the word "Figure".

Intro / Related Work strategy (Directive 2)

• Strictly separate Introduction (macro-level context, 10-20 papers,
  foundational + survey + impact) from Related Work (micro-level technical
  baselines, 30-50 papers, divided into 2-4 methodology clusters that
  directly compete with or precede the proposed approach).

• For each Related Work cluster: provide methodology_cluster,
  sota_investigation_mission, limitation_hypothesis,
  limitation_search_queries, bridge_to_our_method.

• CRITICAL TIMELINE RULE: Do not instruct searches for any papers
  published after {cutoff_date}. Derive cutoff_date from
  conference_guidelines.md (e.g., "ICLR 2025 → cutoff October 2024",
  "CVPR 2025 → cutoff November 2024"). If unspecified, default to one month
  before today's date.

Section plan (Directive 3)

• Structural hierarchy: if Subsection X.1 is created, X.2 is mandatory.
  No orphaned subsections. Omit subsections entirely if a section does not
  require division.

• Content specificity: each content_bullets entry must reference source
  materials concretely. AVOID "Describe the model". REQUIRE "Formalize the
  Temporal-Aware Attention mechanism using Eq. 3 from idea.md."

• Mandatory citations: every dataset, optimizer, metric, and
  foundational architecture/model mentioned in idea.md or
  experimental_log.md MUST have a citation hint, no matter how ubiquitous
  (e.g., AdamW, ResNet, ImageNet, CLIP, Transformer, LLaMA, GPT, LLaVA).

• Citation hint format:

  • If you know the exact author and title:
    "Author (Exact Paper Title)"

  • Otherwise: "research paper or technical report introducing '[Exact Model/Dataset/Metric Name]'"
  • Do NOT guess or hallucinate authors.

Output

Exactly one file: workspace/outline.json. No prose, no code blocks, no
markdown. The Section Writing Agent and Literature Review Agent will parse
this JSON directly.

See references/example-output.json for a complete worked example from the
paper (App. F.1, pp. 43–44).

Resources

• references/prompt.md — verbatim Outline Agent prompt from App. F.1
• references/outline-schema.md — prose explanation of the schema
• references/outline_schema.json — machine-readable JSON Schema
• references/example-output.json — example output from the paper
• references/allowed-values.md — enumerated allowed values for each enum field
• scripts/validate_outline.py — JSON Schema validator
• skills/shared/research_brief_template.md — NEW §1 schema; append after outline.json passes validation