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OAgents: An Empirical Study of Building Effective Agents

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arxiv 2506.15741 v2 pith:3S3JRX5Q submitted 2025-06-17 cs.AI cs.CL

OAgents: An Empirical Study of Building Effective Agents

classification cs.AI cs.CL
keywords agentcomponentsdesignoagentsresearchagenticagentschoices
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Recently, Agentic AI has become an increasingly popular research field. However, we argue that current agent research practices lack standardization and scientific rigor, making it hard to conduct fair comparisons among methods. As a result, it is still unclear how different design choices in agent frameworks affect effectiveness, and measuring their progress remains challenging. In this work, we conduct a systematic empirical study on GAIA benchmark and BrowseComp to examine the impact of popular design choices in key agent components in a fair and rigorous manner. We find that the lack of a standard evaluation protocol makes previous works, even open-sourced ones, non-reproducible, with significant variance between random runs. Therefore, we introduce a more robust evaluation protocol to stabilize comparisons. Our study reveals which components and designs are crucial for effective agents, while others are redundant, despite seeming logical. Based on our findings, we build and open-source OAgents, a new foundation agent framework that achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source projects. OAgents offers a modular design for various agent components, promoting future research in Agentic AI.

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