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CS 329Z: Engineering AI Agents Stanford / Fall 2026 @stanfordnlp https://cs329z.stanford.edu/ 课程定位：从"模型"到"系统"的工程学 覆盖：简单 LLM 流水线 → 复合 AI 系统 → 自主 Agent。三位讲师的背景也高度互补： @Diyi_Yang（斯坦福 NLP 教授，人机交互与社会计算方向） @michaelryan207（DSPy 核心贡献者，自动评估 AutoMetrics 作者） @jyangballin（SWE-agent / SWE-bench / SWE-smith 作者，软件工程 Agent 领域最重要的研究者之一） # 课程主线：三大工程挑战 贯穿全课的三个核心问题——分解（decomposition）、数据（data）、评估（evaluation）。11 周的内容基本围绕这三条线展开，可以分为五个模块： 模块 1：构建基元（Week 2–3） · LLM 作为构建材料：API/SDK（litellm）、结构化输出、约束生成、解码策略、test-time compute、上下文工程、模型选型与成本/延迟权衡 · RAG：embedding、向量库、分块策略、混合检索、cross-encoder 与 ColBERT 后期交互 · 工具调用：函数调用 API、MCP（Model Context Protocol）、工具设计、代码沙箱、错误处理与重试 模块 2：框架与设计模式（Week 3–5） · 框架层：DSPy（signature / module / optimizer）、LangChain/LangGraph、LlamaIndex，重点是"框架抽象了什么 vs. 你手写了什么" · 设计模式：workflow vs. agent 的分类学，五种可组合 workflow 模式，ReAct / plan-and-execute / reflection，"scaffold（脚手架）本身就是设计决策" · 记忆架构：短期/长期记忆、记忆作为工具动作、文件系统作为外化记忆、跨 Agent 记忆（MemGPT、Mem0、Generative Agents） · 多 Agent 系统：编排模式、handoff 与状态传递，以及一个很有态度的对照阅读——既读 AutoGen，也读《Why Do Multi-Agent LLM Systems Fail?》和 Neubig 的《Don't Sleep on Single-agent Systems》 模块 3：优化（Week 5） · 从提示词到微调的全景：GEPA、MIPROv2、OPRO、TextGrad（提示优化）；LoRA/QLoRA、蒸馏、RLHF/DPO（权重优化）；test-time scaling（推理算力） · 核心问题是决策框架：什么时候优化 prompt、什么时候优化 weights、什么时候堆推理算力 模块 4：数据与评估（Week 6–8）——最有分量的部分 · 数据：trace、demonstration、feedback 三类数据；训练数据 vs. 评估数据；数据飞轮；合成数据；从 Agent 轨迹构建数据集（SWE-smith） · 评估基础：为什么 eval 难；4 元组框架（request / environment / stopping criteria / scorer）；好 benchmark 的性质；tinyBenchmarks · 评估基础设施：三类 grader、LLM-as-judge 的 prompt 设计与已知偏差、pairwise vs. pointwise、非确定性指标 pass@k vs. pass^k、harness 设计 模块 5：安全与前沿（Week 8–11） · 安全：工具访问的隐私风险、prompt injection（含间接注入）、红队、沙箱与权限模型、输出护栏、human-in-the-loop · Coding Agent：SWE-agent、Claude Code、OpenHands 的端到端架构对比 · 主动式 Agent：从 reactive 到 proactive，General User Models（GUM）、Next Action Prediction，以及"Agent 何时应主动、何时应等待"的 mixed-initiative 问题 · 开放问题：多模态/web/计算机使用 Agent、科学 Agent、长时运行架构、生产可观测性（tracing、monitoring、成本管理） # 作业设计：一手建、一手评 HW1：从零构建 Agent 系统（10%） 给定论文库，构建能检索并推理回答科学问题的 Agent。 · Part A：只用 litellm 手写 RAG + 工具调用 + ReAct 式 Agent 循环 · Part B：用 DSPy 重建关键组件，并反思框架抽象了什么 HW2：评估一个 Agent（10%） 给定一个预构建 Agent，设计完整评估套件：代码型 grader、至少一个 LLM-as-judge、用 4 元组框架构建 benchmark 任务、错误分析。

I just published my roadmap for building evals on highly subjective tasks. Here are the key steps involved and practical tricks for reducing noise / increasing confidence… Blog is here: https://cameronrwolfe.substack.com/p/subjective-evals Why is this difficult? Evaluating agents is already hard due to their broad scope, emphasis on expensive / long-horizon tasks, and non-determinism. Subjective tasks make this even harder because we cannot deterministically verify solutions and must rely on human judgments (or LLM judges). This introduces additional noise into an already difficult evaluation process. Evaluation roadmap. We can build reliable evaluations using a repeatable framework with three components: - Human evaluation: Our North Star for quality. Create quality guidelines that clearly define quality with the help of subject-matter experts, calibrate human evaluators to ensure agreement, and continually monitor evaluation quality. - Offline evaluation: Use calibrated LLM judges or task-specific rubrics as an efficient proxy for human evaluation. This allows us to scale experimentation without relying on expensive human evaluation for every new model. - Production monitoring: Track quality signals from real-world agent usage and use A/B testing to validate improvements before fully deploying a new agent. Multi-stage evaluation. These components form a tiered evaluation process: Offline evaluation → Human evaluation → Production A/B test → Full deployment We can test many ideas automatically, send promising candidates to human evaluation, and validate improvements through production A/B testing. Continual production monitoring then allows us to discover new use cases / failure cases in production that we can add into the earlier stages of evaluation to create a feedback loop. Sampling useful data. Evaluation quality depends heavily on which tasks we select. We want tasks that are diverse, realistic, difficult, discriminative, and accurate. Techniques like structured task taxonomies, model-based difficulty filtering, Item Response Theory (IRT), and LLM-based auditing help us construct more informative evaluation sets. Handling noise. We should leverage statistics throughout the evaluation process: - Power analysis: Estimate the number of evaluation samples needed to detect meaningful improvements. - Confidence intervals: Quantify uncertainty and provide clear confidence signals alongside evaluation results. - Re-sampling: Repeat agent / judge evaluations to reduce within-task variance and potentially tighten confidence intervals. - Paired comparisons: Evaluate models on the same tasks to more reliably detect performance differences. Key takeaway. An improved benchmark score does not always mean our agent is more capable. We need well-designed evaluation tasks, calibrated human / model evaluators, and statistical confidence signals to distinguish meaningful capability improvements from noise (especially on subjective tasks). By combining these techniques into a repeatable evaluation process / roadmap, we can make building and maintaining evaluation suites more systematic, reliable, and scalable.

Well said Vas. AI will help us conquer disease, but this will take time, effort and lots and lots of data that doesn’t exist, yet. I would add that robotic labs will begin to make scaling data more tractable. https://lnkd.in/p/g8qvP5qX

https://x.com/i/article/2103456568209768449

https://x.com/i/article/2112152891670896640