OceanMind: A multi-agent AI system for ocean diagnosis
Authors: Fan Zhang, Weicong Cheng, Yuheng Chen, Hiuseut Kung, Ying Zhang, Aixi Han, Quanjia Zhong, Can Yang, Jianping Gan
Organizations: Department of Mathematics, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong SAR, China. · Center for Ocean Research in Hong Kong and Macau, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong SAR, China. · Department of Ocean Science, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong SAR, China.
Time-dependent, three-dimensional (3D) oceanic multi-variables define coherent states of the evolving ocean to facilitate ocean diagnosis and advance ocean science to better inform environmental and hazard management. However, extracting quantitative evidence from these variables requires substantial and complex analytical effort. We introduce OceanMind, a multi-agent AI system that directly couples large language models (LLMs) with comprehensive time-dependent 3D ocean states for swift and effective diagnosis. OceanMind organizes the analytical process into four coordinated complexity stages: Query Routing, Skill-based Planning, Tool Execution, and Evidence-based Summary Generation. Specialized agents interpret user requests, construct and execute multi-step computational workflows, and synthesize quantitative evidence. To ensure reliable workflow construction, 63 reusable ocean-specific analysis skills serve as procedural manuals that guide the LLM agent in selecting data, conducting diagnostics, and applying analytical tools. With reflection and replanning mechanisms that use execution feedback to repair invalid plans, OceanMind ensures reliable analysis workflows across diverse needs. On a benchmark of 240 computational-workflow queries spanning the four stages, OceanMind outperformed general ReAct agents with the same registered tool pool, achieving relative improvements of 41.2% in effectiveness and 21.5% in efficiency. Beyond the benchmark, OceanMind reproduced published oceanic diagnostics, validated hypotheses, and supported environmental decision-making over global oceans. Overall, OceanMind advances LLMs by integrating them with time-dependent 3D ocean analysis, enabling scientific interpretation and enhancing formulation of environmental policies based on quantitative ocean evidence.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Overview of OceanMind. a. Geographic domains used to evaluate OceanMind. Area 1 covered the China Seas and adjacent western Pacific using CMOMS, whereas Areas 2 and 3 represented the Gulf of Mexico region and tropical Pacific using global CMEMS products, respectively. b. Example of an interactive OceanMind analysis evaluating the suitability of China’s coastal seas for aquaculture and marine ranching. The graphical user interface (GUI) presented the analysis, quantitative evidence, spatial visualization, and synthesized response. c. Flow chart of the multi-agent architecture of OceanMind. User requests are processed through four coordinated stages: Query Routing, Skill-based Planning, Tool Execution, and Evidence-based Summary Generation. The QueryProcessor interprets each request and routes the request to an Internet-based response path or to computational analysis. For computational requests, the PlannerAgent selects and composes reusable skills from the Ocean Skill Library to construct a multi-step workflow. The execution harness binds appropriate tools, invokes the CodingAgent when needed, and performs computations from the Ocean Tool Registry on time-dependent 3D ocean state estimates. The ResultSynthesizer integrates the resulting evidence, and the Visualization module and MemoryAgent support result inspection and continued interaction. Reflection and replanning return execution feedback to the PlannerAgent when the workflow needs to be corrected.
Figure 2: Benchmarking OceanMind across ocean analytical tasks. a. Overall performance of OceanMind, ReAct(Qwen), and ReAct(Claude) across 240 queries. Effectiveness is the rule-reviewed pass rate. Efficiency is the mean effective step efficiency, defined as min(Nref/Nrun,Nrun/Nref) from the numbers of executed and reference core steps. Robustness is the pass rate stratified by L1 to L4 task complexity. Red annotations indicate OceanMind’s relative improvement over the strongest ReAct baseline. b-h. Benchmark composition and performance for time-series ( n=32 ), profile ( n=16 ), spatial-field ( n=52 ), event-detection ( n=40 ), statistical ( n=48 ), diagram ( n=12 ), and interpretation ( n=40 ) queries. Each panel lists representative query families, shows the complexity-level distribution, and compares pass rate, first-pass rate, tool-success rate, gold-tool coverage, and effective step efficiency.
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Figure 4: Comparing how well OceanMind, ChatGPT, and OceanAI validate a scientific hypothesis. Each system was asked whether there were chlorophyll-a bloom hotspots in the East China Sea from April to June 2015 associated with particular water masses. OceanMind executed a traceable 11-step workflow and identified enriching Coastal Fresh Surface Water in hotspot tiles (34.5% versus 13.0% in the regional background). ChatGPT provided a plausible literature-based explanation without a quantitative analysis, whereas OceanAI did not complete the request in this run.
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Figure 6: OceanMind can be applied globally. a. Global map showing the representative CMEMS analysis domains: Area 2, from 98.68 ∘ W to 76.98 ∘ W and from 16.35 ∘ N to 32.02 ∘ N, and Area 3, from 120 ∘ E to 80 ∘ W and from 10 ∘ S to 10 ∘ N. b. Area 2 diagnostics from full-depth CMEMS products in the Gulf of Mexico: June to September 2025 mean surface current speed and eddy kinetic energy; marine heatwave event timing, extent, intensity, cumulative exposure, and thermal burden for the analysis period from 1 April 2025 to 31 March 2026; and relatively low bottom-oxygen exposure from June to September 2025, identified using a relaxed threshold of 150 mmol m -3 . c. Area 3 tropical Pacific diagnostics from the CMEMS surface layer (0.494 m) from 1 January 2005 to 31 December 2025, including EI Niño 3.4 SST, climatology and anomaly, regional SST trends, and EOF modes of EI Niño 3.4 SST anomalies. For continuous maps, the graphical user interface used robust 2nd-98th percentile display limits (or the symmetric 98th percentile of absolute values for fields crossing zero). Reported extrema were calculated from the full fields and might exceed the displayed colorbar limits.
Real-world Earth observation (EO) agents must translate high-level scientific questions into executable workflows to acquire observations, prepare data, perform domain computations, and derive conclusions from runtime evidence. Existing EO agents typically start from supplied observations, while benchmarks typically provide prepared inputs or candidate answers, leaving full-chain open-world EO execution largely untested. We present Earth-Agent-Pro, an execution-adaptive Plan-and-Execute framework using expert-authored skills to constrain planning and runtime tool use. Workflow-centered structured memory records planned steps, accepted evidence, and their dependencies, enabling repair of only the affected workflow suffix when runtime evidence invalidates a step. Separate large language model adapters use sequence-level supervised fine-tuning for planner workflow composition and node-level group relative policy optimization with locally verifiable rewards for executor tool-argument grounding. Earth-Bench-Pro instantiates 248 expert-curated task cores as 744 questions under three matched regimes. Its 248 Open-World Execution questions span RGB imagery, spectral observations, and remote sensing products, pairing high-level requests with runtime data requirements, executable trajectories, and open-ended answers grounded in execution evidence. With a shared GPT-5 backbone, Earth-Agent-Pro achieves 66.13% LLM-as-Judge accuracy, exceeding ReAct by 20.95 points in this metric and 24.44 points in Tools-In-Order. Joint adapter tuning raises Qwen3.5-9B LLM-as-Judge accuracy from 38.31% to 50.00%, an 11.69-point gain over the untuned configuration. Planning-only evaluation and execution with the reference workflow show that the adapters improve workflow composition and argument grounding, respectively. Code and datasets will be released soon.
Zhutao Lv, Chenhao Dang, Yi Feng +5
Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University · Sun Yat-Sen University · Shanghai Jiao Tong University +3
Large language models and the agents built on them are the most capable reasoning machines ever built, and science is beginning to put them to work. Atmospheric and oceanic sciences are starting to see agentic integration, but coastal hydrodynamics remains largely untouched by AI. Simply, agents cannot easily read its data products without saturating their context windows. A time frame from a coastal model can hold hundreds of megabytes, and if the archive's chunking does not suit the query, the agent will spend more time downloading and compacting than gaining insights. After all, the archives were designed for storage, not for the fast, on-the-fly access agents need. Speech and music once hit the same wall. A minute of audio is millions of numbers, yet today's audio models hold conversations and write music. They "learned" to do this by "listening" to tokens. Neural audio codecs turn waveforms into short sequences of discrete symbols that a model reads like words and decodes back into sound. Coastal water is a similar signal: dense, finely sampled, and repeatable. We are convinced it has an analogous compact native representation that preserves the salient physics. Tokens are that representation: small integers, light enough for an agent to sweep six months of a coastline in seconds. Agents can then do more than simple lookup-related tasks; they can form and test their hypotheses as they explore the tokenized representation efficiently. Herein, we build this framework, using vector quantized variational autoencoders to compress tide level, the non-tidal residual, and surface wind speed into 16x16 grids of tokens along the US Atlantic and Gulf coasts. Agents traverse and explore these grids (e.g., tracking, spatiotemporal trend analysis) considerably faster than raw archives in both on-prem and off-prem modalities, while correctly answering several types of under-specified queries.
Jinpai Zhao, Albert Cerrone, Joannes Westerink +1
Oden Institute University of Texas at Austin Austin, Texas, USA · CEEES University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana, USA
Large language model (LLM) agents have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in tool use, reasoning, and code generation, yet single-agent systems exhibit fundamental limitations when confronted with complex research tasks demanding multi-source synthesis, adversarial verification, and personalized delivery. We present DOVA (Deep Orchestrated Versatile Agent), a multi-agent platform introducing three key innovations: (1) deliberation-first orchestration, where explicit meta-reasoning precedes tool invocation, informed by a persistent user model and entity-aware conversation context; (2) hybrid collaborative reasoning, a composable three-phase pipeline unifying ensemble diversity, blackboard transparency, and iterative refinement; and (3) adaptive multi-tiered thinking, a six-level token-budget allocation scheme that reduces inference cost by 40-60% on simple tasks while preserving deep reasoning capacity. We formalize the core algorithms, present an architectural ablation study across seven system configurations, and analyze the contribution of each component to answer confidence, source coverage, and token efficiency.
Aaron Shen, Alfred Shen
University of California, Berkeley, USA · Amazon Web Services, USA