Asta is a set of skills for scientific research, usable by local coding agents.
# Whole plugins (skills + hooks) into your agent's native plugin system.
# Pick `asta` (core) OR `asta-preview` (all; a superset of `asta` — install one).
npx plugins add allenai/asta-plugins
# Skills only (loose skill files).
npx skills add allenai/asta-plugins -g
# Claude Code marketplace (alternative to npx plugins)
> /plugin marketplace add allenai/asta-plugins
> /plugin install asta
- Semantic Scholar Lookup - Quick paper/author lookups and metadata queries
- Document Management - Local document metadata index for tracking and searching papers
- PDF Text Extraction - Extract text from PDFs using olmOCR (cloud-based, no GPU required)
Install all with --all, or pick specific ones with --skill "Name":
# Any agent
npx skills add allenai/asta-plugins --all -g
# Claude Code only (auto-updates)
> /plugin install asta-preview
- Find Literature - General paper searching and citation finding
- Literature Report Generation - Comprehensive report writing with synthesis
- Run Experiment - Computational experiments with automated report generation
- research step - Autonomous research loop with iterative state tracking
Example user requests:
- "Find papers on RLHF"
- "Generate a literature review on transformers"
- "Get details for arXiv:2005.14165"
- "What papers cite the GPT-3 paper?"
- "Store this paper in Asta" / "Search my Asta documents for transformers"
- "Extract text from this PDF" / "OCR this document"
- "Run an experiment to test GPT-4 translation quality"
The skills install an asta CLI tool, which has sub-commands for the various research functions.
The CLI can be used directly from the command line or invoked by agents via Bash commands.
Some skills are pass-through commands to CLIs hosted in other repos. These are installed automatically on first invocation.
Some skills are implemented by calling external APIs hosted by Ai2. For these, the CLI will prompt you to authenticate on first use.
A Docker image with the asta CLI, skills, and Quarto pre-installed. Published to ghcr.io/allenai/asta on each release.
docker pull ghcr.io/allenai/asta:v0.10.0Generate an ASTA_TOKEN on the host (one-time, expires after 30 days):
asta auth login
export ASTA_TOKEN=$(asta auth print-token --raw --refresh)The source repo is at /opt/asta-plugins inside the image. Pass your
tokens, install your agent, and register skills:
docker run --rm -it -e ASTA_TOKEN -e ANTHROPIC_API_KEY \
ghcr.io/allenai/asta:latest bash
# Install Claude Code and register skills:
curl -fsSL https://claude.ai/install.sh | bash
claude plugin marketplace add /opt/asta-plugins --scope user
claude plugin install asta-preview
# Or install any other agent and use npx:
npx skills add /opt/asta-plugins -g --all --yesThe workspace skill lets users see and save the agent's work on a research project: scaffold infrastructure (Quarto, GitHub Pages auto-deploy with PR previews, devcontainer), show rendered work, save iterations.
agent-baselines solvers (e.g. inspect-swe) run Asta skills against any Inspect-compatible eval suite via -S skills=<path>: Swapping in local skills points it at the canonical plugins/asta-preview/skills tree (edit it directly). Demo is a worked example on AstaBench, a scientific research suite for AI agents.
Invoke the improve-skills skill if you:
- Observed an agent doing the wrong thing while using a skill (or not doing what you asked).
- Want an agent to be able to do something it currently can't (extend a skill, or add a new one).
Hand off at whatever depth you reach: a reported problem, a failing test for a fixer to pick up, or a fix you've validated with a paired eval.
Contributors changing a skill (including regression-checking before merging) follow the same workflow — see DEVELOPER.md.
See DEVELOPER.md for contributor guidelines, architecture details, and development setup.
Apache 2.0