/outline-agent

name: outline-agent
description: Step 1 of the PaperOrchestra pipeline (arXiv:2604.05018). Convert (idea.md, experimental_log.md, template.tex, conference_guidelines.md) into a strict JSON outline containing a plotting plan, literature search plan (Intro + Related Work), and section-level writing plan with citation hints. TRIGGER when the orchestrator delegates Step 1 or when the user asks to "outline a paper from raw materials" or "generate the paper structure".

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**:

   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