Starfish is designed to turn research exploration from a one-off tool into a continuously evolving system. Through autonomous multi-agent collaboration, it can proactively retrieve evidence, generate insights, and iteratively refine strategies after each execution cycle. It is ready to use out of the box, yet not a static pipeline: it grows with evolving agent skills, toolsets, and memory bases. Compared with traditional human-in-the-loop workflows, Starfish follows a more human-on-the-loop paradigm, where researchers steer direction and judgment boundaries while AI co-evolves as a long-term research partner.
- Multi-Agent: One orchestrator coordinates specialized agents to solve complex research tasks collaboratively.
- Subagent: Heterogeneous subagents can compete and negotiate, with dynamic selection by quality, cost, and latency.
- Workflow: Retrieval, checkpointing, graph building, and lineage analysis are connected into an observable and replayable flow.
- Knowledge Graph: Automatically extracts papers, concepts, and relations into a structured research graph.
- Lineage Tree: Expands from a key paper to ancestors and descendants for tracing scientific evolution.
Homepage with bilingual entry and research input. |
Workflow panel with paper retrieval and progress logs. |
Knowledge graph canvas for entities and relations. |
Lineage tree view for ancestry and descendants. |
docker compose up -d --buildAfter startup:
- Frontend:
http://localhost:17327 - Backend:
http://localhost:14032
Use backend/.env for backend settings and frontend/.env.local for frontend settings (optional).
# LLM
API_KEY=your_api_key
OPENAI_BASE_URL=https://api.openai.com/v1
OPENAI_MODEL=gpt-5.3-codex
EMBEDDING_MODEL=text-embedding-v3
# Data Layer
POSTGRES_DSN=postgresql://starfish:starfish@localhost:5432/starfish
NEO4J_URI=bolt://localhost:7687
NEO4J_USERNAME=neo4j
NEO4J_PASSWORD=starfish
REDIS_URL=redis://localhost:6379/0
# Auth
GOOGLE_CLIENT_ID=
GITHUB_OAUTH_CLIENT_ID=
GITHUB_OAUTH_CLIENT_SECRET=
GITHUB_OAUTH_REDIRECT_URI=http://localhost:17327/auth/github/callback
SESSION_SECRET=change-this-session-secret
# Service
CORS_ORIGINS=http://localhost:17327,http://127.0.0.1:17327# frontend/.env.local
VITE_API_BASE_URL=http://localhost:14032
VITE_GOOGLE_CLIENT_ID=For GitHub OAuth, ensure the callback URL configured in your GitHub OAuth App exactly matches GITHUB_OAUTH_REDIRECT_URI.
Optional retrieval enhancers: SEMANTIC_SCHOLAR_API_KEY, OPENALEX_MAILTO, SCITE_API_KEY, GITHUB_TOKEN.