MARA: the Multi-Agent Review Assistant

The problem — peer review is breaking

• An explosion of scientific publications – 3.3 million articles were published in 2022 alone and increases yearly​ [1]
• Weeks-to-months delays: the median end-to-end time can be 160 days to acceptance [2]
• Editor & reviewer overload: 80 % of review requests go to the same small cohort of scholars [3]

In short, human editors are drowning in administrative and analytic checks; authors wait; reviewers burn out; good science stalls.

MARA: the Multi-Agent Review Assistant

Our project turns the slow, overloaded peer-review pipeline into a “living editorial board” of cooperating reasoning agents that deliver the same checks a journal editor needs, in hours instead of weeks, while giving every stakeholder a clear, auditable report.

We performed a small-scale benchmark by retrieving papers from openreview.net and evaluating our system on them. The results are presented below:

How to use?

A dockerized application for reviewing academic papers, consisting of a FastAPI backend, React frontend, and PostgreSQL database.

Getting Started

Prerequisites

• Docker
• Docker Compose

Environment Variables

The application uses environment variables for configuration. You can customize them by:

1. Creating a .env file in the project root with the following variables:

# Database Configuration
POSTGRES_USER=postgres
POSTGRES_PASSWORD=postgres
POSTGRES_DB=postgres

# Backend Configuration
ALLOWED_ORIGINS=http://localhost:5173

# Frontend Configuration
VITE_API_URL=http://localhost:8000

Running the Application

1. Build and start the containers:

docker-compose up -d

2. Access the application:

   • Frontend: http://localhost:5173
   • Backend API: http://localhost:8000

3. Stop the application:

docker-compose down

Development Mode

The application is configured for development with hot-reloading:

• Frontend changes will automatically refresh the browser
• Backend changes will automatically restart the API server
• Volume mounts ensure local changes are reflected in the containers

Architecture

• Frontend: React/TypeScript with Vite
• Backend: FastAPI (Python)
• Database: PostgreSQL

Containers

• postgres: Database service
• backend: FastAPI application
• frontend: React application

Troubleshooting

• If you encounter database connection issues, ensure PostgreSQL has fully started before the backend attempts to connect.
• For permission issues with volumes, check Docker's volume permissions.

References

• [1] https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsb202333/publication-output-by-region-country-or-economy-and-by-scientific-field
• [2] https://www.cell.com/heliyon/home
• [3] https://eon.pubpub.org/pub/3ana9ey0/release/2