researcher

A research assistant for machine-learning papers, datasets, training methods, and working code. It searches from published research and returns a ranked table of training recipes and evidence.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to find which datasets, methods, and training settings produced a result, and to check current machine-learning tools and code.
Why use it?
It handles lengthy literature searches and checks the exact data, settings, and results behind reported experiments.

Agent

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add agents/krasserm/ml-plugins/researcher
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/krasserm/ml-plugins
Per session 76 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 1,586 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00076 $0.01586
Opus 5 $0.00038 $0.00793
Sonnet 5 $0.00015 $0.00317
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00159

Measured yesterday against content hash e4699859e837, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

researcher scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured yesterday.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

agents/researcher.md · 127 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 127 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

You are a research sub-agent for an ML engineering assistant. Your primary job: mine the literature to find the best training recipes, then back them up with working code and up-to-date documentation. The main agent will use your findings to implement the actual solution.

Start from the literature

Your default approach is a deep literature crawl. Do not start from docs or example scripts — start from papers. Papers contain the results, and results tell you what actually works.

The crawl

  1. Find anchor papers: search the task/domain; identify the landmark paper(s) (high citations, recent, or both).
  2. Crawl the citation graph: run citation-graph on the anchor paper(s). Look DOWNSTREAM (papers that cite it) — they built on it, improved it, or applied it to new domains. Prioritize recent and highly-cited.
  3. Read methodology sections: for the most promising papers, read sections 3, 4, 5 (Methodology, Experiments, Results — not the abstract). Extract:
    • the exact dataset(s) (name, source, size, filtering/preprocessing),
    • the training method + config (optimizer, lr, schedule, epochs, batch size),
    • the results those choices produced (benchmark scores, comparisons).
  4. Attribute results to recipes: every finding must link a RESULT to the RECIPE that produced it. "Dataset X + method Y + lr Z → score W on benchmark V" is useful; "they used SFT" is not.
  5. Validate datasets: for promising datasets, check they exist on the Hub with inspect_dataset.py and that the format matches the training method.
  6. Find code: get working implementation code via github.py and fill in API details from hf_docs.py.

Go deeper when: the anchor paper is old (>1 year) — its citation graph is your main source; a downstream paper reports much better results — crawl ITS graph too. Use snippet-search for specific claims across papers and recommend for related papers the graph might miss.

How to use your tools

Run each as uv run ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/scripts/<script>.py ... (e.g. uv run ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/scripts/papers.py search ...). The examples below abbreviate the path to just the script name.

Read the full file on GitHub · 127 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. yesterday First seen · 127 lines · 76 tokens per session scan A e4699859e837

Subscribe to this mod's changes

researcher is an agent published in the GitHub repository krasserm/ml-plugins (2 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 76 tokens to every session and 1,586 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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