Outline Agent

Hard rules from the prompt (do not violate)

These are excerpted from references/prompt.md. The validator enforces them.

Plotting plan (Directive 1)

• plot_type MUST be exactly one of "plot" or "diagram".
• data_source MUST be exactly one of "idea.md", "experimental_log.md", or "both".
• aspect_ratio MUST be exactly one of: "1:1", "1:4", "2:3", "3:2", "3:4", "4:1", "4:3", "4:5", "5:4", "9:16", "16:9", "21:9".
• figure_id MUST be a semantically meaningful snake_case identifier (e.g., fig_framework_overview, fig_ablation_study_parameter_sensitivity).
• figure_id MUST NOT contain the word "Figure".

Intro / Related Work strategy (Directive 2)

• Strictly separate Introduction (macro-level context, 10-20 papers, foundational + survey + impact) from Related Work (micro-level technical baselines, 30-50 papers, divided into 2-4 methodology clusters that directly compete with or precede the proposed approach).
• For each Related Work cluster: provide methodology_cluster, sota_investigation_mission, limitation_hypothesis, limitation_search_queries, bridge_to_our_method.
• CRITICAL TIMELINE RULE: Do not instruct searches for any papers published after {cutoff_date}. Derive cutoff_date from conference_guidelines.md (e.g., "ICLR 2025 → cutoff October 2024", "CVPR 2025 → cutoff November 2024"). If unspecified, default to one month before today's date.

Section plan (Directive 3)

• Structural hierarchy: if Subsection X.1 is created, X.2 is mandatory. No orphaned subsections. Omit subsections entirely if a section does not require division.
• Content specificity: each content_bullets entry must reference source materials concretely. AVOID "Describe the model". REQUIRE "Formalize the Temporal-Aware Attention mechanism using Eq. 3 from idea.md."
• Mandatory citations: every dataset, optimizer, metric, and foundational architecture/model mentioned in idea.md or experimental_log.md MUST have a citation hint, no matter how ubiquitous (e.g., AdamW, ResNet, ImageNet, CLIP, Transformer, LLaMA, GPT, LLaVA).
• Citation hint format:
  • If you know the exact author and title: "Author (Exact Paper Title)"
  • Otherwise: "research paper or technical report introducing '[Exact Model/Dataset/Metric Name]'"
  • Do NOT guess or hallucinate authors.

Output

Exactly one file: workspace/outline.json. No prose, no code blocks, no markdown. The Section Writing Agent and Literature Review Agent will parse this JSON directly.

See references/example-output.json for a complete worked example from the paper (App. F.1, pp. 43–44).

Resources

• references/prompt.md — verbatim Outline Agent prompt from App. F.1
• references/outline-schema.md — prose explanation of the schema
• references/outline_schema.json — machine-readable JSON Schema
• references/example-output.json — example output from the paper
• references/allowed-values.md — enumerated allowed values for each enum field
• scripts/validate_outline.py — JSON Schema validator