ProtAgent-8B Matches Frontier Models on Protein Tool Tasks
Interaction-level credit assignment, not raw model scale, is what closes the gap with frontier systems here — a 671B model loses by roughly 20 points under the same protocol. Researchers building tool-using agents in specialized domains can apply the same step-level reward scheme without frontier API budgets. The authors' caveat that annotation coverage does not prove biological correctness is worth keeping in mind when comparing reported scores.