***Tiny-Agent-α*** is an extension of Dria-Agent-a, trained on top of the [Qwen2.5-Coder](https://huggingface.co/collections/Qwen/qwen25-coder-66eaa22e6f99801bf65b0c2f) series to be used in edge devices. These models are carefully fine tuned with quantization aware training to minimize performance degradation after quantization.
Tiny-Agent-α employs ***Pythonic function calling***, which is LLMs using blocks of Python code to interact with provided tools and output actions. This method was inspired by many previous work, including but not limited to [DynaSaur](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.01747), [RLEF](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.02089), [ADAS](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2408.08435) and [CAMEL](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.17760). This way of function calling has a few advantages over traditional JSON-based function calling methods:
1.**One-shot Parallel Multiple Function Calls:** The model can can utilise many synchronous processes in one chat turn to arrive to a solution, which would require other function calling models multiple turns of conversation.
2.**Free-form Reasoning and Actions:** The model provides reasoning traces freely in natural language and the actions in between \`\`\`python \`\`\` blocks, as it already tends to do without special prompting or tuning. This tries to mitigate the possible performance loss caused by imposing specific formats on LLM outputs discussed in [Let Me Speak Freely?](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2408.02442)
3.**On-the-fly Complex Solution Generation:** The solution provided by the model is essentially a Python program with the exclusion of some "risky" builtins like `exec`, `eval` and `compile` (see full list in **Quickstart** below). This enables the model to implement custom complex logic with conditionals and synchronous pipelines (using the output of one function in the next function's arguments) which would not be possible with the current JSON-based function calling methods (as far as we know).
## Quickstart
You can use tiny-agents easily with the dria_agent package:
````bash
pip install dria_agent
````
This package handles models, tools, code execution, and backend (supports mlx, ollama, and transformers).
### Usage
Decorate functions with @tool to expose them to the agent.
We evaluate the model on the **Dria-Pythonic-Agent-Benchmark ([DPAB](https://github.com/firstbatchxyz/function-calling-eval)):** The benchmark we curated with a synthetic data generation +model-based validation + filtering and manual selection to evaluate LLMs on their Pythonic function calling ability, spanning multiple scenarios and tasks. See [blog](https://huggingface.co/blog/andthattoo/dpab-a) for more information.
Below are the DPAB results:
Current benchmark results for various models **(strict)**: