Agent Data Protocol: Unifying Datasets for Diverse, Effective Fine-tuning of LLM Agents
Authors
Yueqi Song
Ketan Ramaneti
Zaid Sheikh
Ziru Chen
Boyu Gou
Tianbao Xie
Yiheng Xu
Danyang Zhang
Apurva Gandhi
Fan Yang
Joseph Liu
Tianyue Ou
Zhihao Yuan
Frank Xu
Shuyan Zhou
Xingyao Wang
Xiang Yue
Tao Yu
Huan Sun
Yu Su
Graham Neubig
Abstract
Public research results on large-scale supervised finetuning of AI agents remain relatively rare, since the collection of agent training data presents unique challenges. In this work, we argue that the bottleneck is not a lack of underlying data sources, but that a large variety of data is fragmented across heterogeneous formats, tools, and interfaces. To this end, we introduce the agent data protocol (ADP), a light-weight representation language that serves as an "interlingua" between agent datasets in diverse formats and unified agent training pipelines downstream. The design of ADP is expressive enough to capture a large variety of tasks, including API/tool use, browsing, coding, software engineering, and general agentic workflows, while remaining simple to parse and train on without engineering at a per-dataset level. In experiments, we unified a broad collection of 13 existing agent training datasets into ADP format, and converted the standardized ADP data into training-ready formats for multiple agent frameworks. We performed SFT on these data, and demonstrated an average performance gain of ~20% over corresponding base models, and delivers state-of-the-art or near-SOTA performance on standard coding, browsing, tool use, and research benchmarks, without domain-specific tuning. All code and data are released publicly, in the hope that ADP could help lower the barrier to standardized, scalable, and reproducible agent training.
