Decorator for easier tool building

docs/source/en/agents.md

@@ -325,62 +325,37 @@ model = next(iter(list_models(filter=task, sort="downloads", direction=-1)))
 print(model.id)
 ```
 
-This code can be converted into a class that inherits from the [`Tool`] superclass.
+This code can quickly be converted into a tool, just by wrapping it in a function and adding the `tool` decorator:
 
 
-The custom tool needs:
-- An attribute `name`, which corresponds to the name of the tool itself. The name usually describes what the tool does. Since the code returns the model with the most downloads for a task, let's name is `model_download_counter`.
-- An attribute `description` is used to populate the agent's system prompt.
-- An `inputs` attribute, which is a dictionary with keys `"type"` and `"description"`. It contains information that helps the Python interpreter make educated choices about the input.
-- An `output_type` attribute, which specifies the output type.
-- A `forward` method which contains the inference code to be executed.
-
-
-```python
-from transformers import Tool
-from huggingface_hub import list_models
-
-class HFModelDownloadsTool(Tool):
-    name = "model_download_counter"
-    description = (
-        "This is a tool that returns the most downloaded model of a given task on the Hugging Face Hub. "
-        "It returns the name of the checkpoint."
-    )
-
-    inputs = {
-        "task": {
-            "type": "text",
-            "description": "the task category (such as text-classification, depth-estimation, etc)",
-        }
-    }
-    output_type = "text"
-
-    def forward(self, task: str):
-        model = next(iter(list_models(filter=task, sort="downloads", direction=-1)))
-        return model.id
-```
-
-Now that the custom `HfModelDownloadsTool` class is ready, you can save it to a file named `model_downloads.py` and import it for use.
-
-
-```python
-from model_downloads import HFModelDownloadsTool
-
-tool = HFModelDownloadsTool()
-```
-
-You can also share your custom tool to the Hub by calling [`~Tool.push_to_hub`] on the tool. Make sure you've created a repository for it on the Hub and are using a token with read access.
-
-```python
-tool.push_to_hub("{your_username}/hf-model-downloads")
+```py
+from transformers import tool
+
+@tool
+def model_download_counter(task: str) -> str:
+    """
+    This is a tool that returns the most downloaded model of a given task on the Hugging Face Hub.
+    It returns the name of the checkpoint.
+
+    Args:
+        task: The task for which
+    """
+    model = next(iter(list_models(filter="text-classification", sort="downloads", direction=-1)))
+    return model.id
 ```
 
-Load the tool with the [`~Tool.load_tool`] function and pass it to the `tools` parameter in your agent.
+The function needs:
+- A clear name. The name usually describes what the tool does. Since the code returns the model with the most downloads for a task, let's put `model_download_counter`.
+- Type hints on both inputs and output
+- A description, that includes an 'Args:' part where each argument is described (without a type indication this time, it will be pulled from the type hint).
+All these will be automatically baked into the agent's system prompt upon initialization: so strive to make them as clear as possible!
 
-```python
-from transformers import load_tool, CodeAgent
+> [!TIP]
+> This definition format is the same as tool schemas used in `apply_chat_template`, the only difference is the added `tool` decorator: read more on our tool use API [here](https://huggingface.co/blog/unified-tool-use#passing-tools-to-a-chat-template).
 
-model_download_tool = load_tool("m-ric/hf-model-downloads")
+Then you can directly initialize your agent:
+```py
+from transformers import CodeAgent
 agent = CodeAgent(tools=[model_download_tool], llm_engine=llm_engine)
 agent.run(
     "Can you give me the name of the model that has the most downloads in the 'text-to-video' task on the Hugging Face Hub?"
@@ -400,7 +375,6 @@ print(f"The most downloaded model for the 'text-to-video' task is {most_download
 And the output:
 `"The most downloaded model for the 'text-to-video' task is ByteDance/AnimateDiff-Lightning."`
 
-
 ### Manage your agent's toolbox
 
 If you have already initialized an agent, it is inconvenient to reinitialize it from scratch with a tool you want to use. With Transformers, you can manage an agent's toolbox by adding or replacing a tool.

docs/source/en/agents_advanced.md

@@ -60,7 +60,68 @@ manager_agent.run("Who is the CEO of Hugging Face?")
 > For an in-depth example of an efficient multi-agent implementation, see [how we pushed our multi-agent system to the top of the GAIA leaderboard](https://huggingface.co/blog/beating-gaia).
 
 
-## Use tools from gradio or LangChain
+## Advanced tool usage
+
+### Directly define a tool by subclassing Tool, and share it to the Hub
+
+Let's take again the tool example from main documentation, for which we had implemented a `tool` decorator.
+
+If you need to add variation, like custom attributes for your too, you can build your tool following the fine-grained method: building a class that inherits from the [`Tool`] superclass.
+
+The custom tool needs:
+- An attribute `name`, which corresponds to the name of the tool itself. The name usually describes what the tool does. Since the code returns the model with the most downloads for a task, let's name is `model_download_counter`.
+- An attribute `description` is used to populate the agent's system prompt.
+- An `inputs` attribute, which is a dictionary with keys `"type"` and `"description"`. It contains information that helps the Python interpreter make educated choices about the input.
+- An `output_type` attribute, which specifies the output type.
+- A `forward` method which contains the inference code to be executed.
+
+The types for both `inputs` and `output_type` should be amongst [Pydantic formats](https://docs.pydantic.dev/latest/concepts/json_schema/#generating-json-schema).
+
+```python
+from transformers import Tool
+from huggingface_hub import list_models
+
+class HFModelDownloadsTool(Tool):
+    name = "model_download_counter"
+    description = """
+    This is a tool that returns the most downloaded model of a given task on the Hugging Face Hub.
+    It returns the name of the checkpoint."""
+
+    inputs = {
+        "task": {
+            "type": "string",
+            "description": "the task category (such as text-classification, depth-estimation, etc)",
+        }
+    }
+    output_type = "string"
+
+    def forward(self, task: str):
+        model = next(iter(list_models(filter=task, sort="downloads", direction=-1)))
+        return model.id
+```
+
+Now that the custom `HfModelDownloadsTool` class is ready, you can save it to a file named `model_downloads.py` and import it for use.
+
+
+```python
+from model_downloads import HFModelDownloadsTool
+
+tool = HFModelDownloadsTool()
+```
+
+You can also share your custom tool to the Hub by calling [`~Tool.push_to_hub`] on the tool. Make sure you've created a repository for it on the Hub and are using a token with read access.
+
+```python
+tool.push_to_hub("{your_username}/hf-model-downloads")
+```
+
+Load the tool with the [`~Tool.load_tool`] function and pass it to the `tools` parameter in your agent.
+
+```python
+from transformers import load_tool, CodeAgent
+
+model_download_tool = load_tool("m-ric/hf-model-downloads")
+```
 
 ### Use gradio-tools
 

docs/source/en/main_classes/agent.md

@@ -60,6 +60,10 @@ We provide two types of agents, based on the main [`Agent`] class:
 
 [[autodoc]] load_tool
 
+### tool
+
+[[autodoc]] tool
+
 ### Tool
 
 [[autodoc]] Tool

src/transformers/__init__.py

@@ -70,6 +70,7 @@
         "launch_gradio_demo",
         "load_tool",
         "stream_to_gradio",
+        "tool",
     ],
     "audio_utils": [],
     "benchmark": [],
@@ -4819,6 +4820,7 @@
         launch_gradio_demo,
         load_tool,
         stream_to_gradio,
+        tool,
     )
     from .configuration_utils import PretrainedConfig
 

src/transformers/agents/__init__.py

@@ -27,7 +27,7 @@
     "agents": ["Agent", "CodeAgent", "ManagedAgent", "ReactAgent", "ReactCodeAgent", "ReactJsonAgent", "Toolbox"],
     "llm_engine": ["HfApiEngine", "TransformersEngine"],
     "monitoring": ["stream_to_gradio"],
-    "tools": ["PipelineTool", "Tool", "ToolCollection", "launch_gradio_demo", "load_tool"],
+    "tools": ["PipelineTool", "Tool", "ToolCollection", "launch_gradio_demo", "load_tool", "tool"],
 }
 
 try:
@@ -48,7 +48,7 @@
     from .agents import Agent, CodeAgent, ManagedAgent, ReactAgent, ReactCodeAgent, ReactJsonAgent, Toolbox
     from .llm_engine import HfApiEngine, TransformersEngine
     from .monitoring import stream_to_gradio
-    from .tools import PipelineTool, Tool, ToolCollection, launch_gradio_demo, load_tool
+    from .tools import PipelineTool, Tool, ToolCollection, launch_gradio_demo, load_tool, tool
 
     try:
         if not is_torch_available():

src/transformers/agents/agent_types.py

@@ -234,7 +234,7 @@ def to_string(self):
             return self._path
 
 
-AGENT_TYPE_MAPPING = {"text": AgentText, "image": AgentImage, "audio": AgentAudio}
+AGENT_TYPE_MAPPING = {"string": AgentText, "image": AgentImage, "audio": AgentAudio}
 INSTANCE_TYPE_MAPPING = {str: AgentText, ImageType: AgentImage}
 
 if is_torch_available():

src/transformers/agents/agents.py

@@ -22,7 +22,7 @@
 from .. import is_torch_available
 from ..utils import logging as transformers_logging
 from ..utils.import_utils import is_pygments_available
-from .agent_types import AgentAudio, AgentImage, AgentText
+from .agent_types import AgentAudio, AgentImage
 from .default_tools import BASE_PYTHON_TOOLS, FinalAnswerTool, setup_default_tools
 from .llm_engine import HfApiEngine, MessageRole
 from .prompts import (
@@ -626,10 +626,9 @@ def run(self, task: str, return_generated_code: bool = False, **kwargs):
         Example:
 
         ```py
-        from transformers.agents import CodeAgent, PythonInterpreterTool
+        from transformers.agents import CodeAgent
 
-        python_interpreter = PythonInterpreterTool()
-        agent = CodeAgent(tools=[python_interpreter])
+        agent = CodeAgent(tools=[])
         agent.run("What is the result of 2 power 3.7384?")
         ```
         """
@@ -1019,20 +1018,17 @@ def step(self):
                 arguments = {}
             observation = self.execute_tool_call(tool_name, arguments)
             observation_type = type(observation)
-            if observation_type == AgentText:
-                updated_information = str(observation).strip()
-            else:
-                # TODO: observation naming could allow for different names of same type
+            if observation_type in [AgentImage, AgentAudio]:
                 if observation_type == AgentImage:
                     observation_name = "image.png"
                 elif observation_type == AgentAudio:
                     observation_name = "audio.mp3"
-                else:
-                    observation_name = "object.object"
+                # TODO: observation naming could allow for different names of same type
 
                 self.state[observation_name] = observation
                 updated_information = f"Stored '{observation_name}' in memory."
-
+            else:
+                updated_information = str(observation).strip()
             self.logger.info(updated_information)
             current_step_logs["observation"] = updated_information
             return current_step_logs

src/transformers/agents/default_tools.py

@@ -152,8 +152,7 @@ class PythonInterpreterTool(Tool):
     name = "python_interpreter"
     description = "This is a tool that evaluates python code. It can be used to perform calculations."
 
-    output_type = "text"
-    available_tools = BASE_PYTHON_TOOLS.copy()
+    output_type = "string"
 
     def __init__(self, *args, authorized_imports=None, **kwargs):
         if authorized_imports is None:
@@ -162,7 +161,7 @@ def __init__(self, *args, authorized_imports=None, **kwargs):
             self.authorized_imports = list(set(LIST_SAFE_MODULES) | set(authorized_imports))
         self.inputs = {
             "code": {
-                "type": "text",
+                "type": "string",
                 "description": (
                     "The code snippet to evaluate. All variables used in this snippet must be defined in this same snippet, "
                     f"else you will get an error. This code can only import the following python libraries: {authorized_imports}."
@@ -173,15 +172,15 @@ def __init__(self, *args, authorized_imports=None, **kwargs):
 
     def forward(self, code):
         output = str(
-            evaluate_python_code(code, static_tools=self.available_tools, authorized_imports=self.authorized_imports)
+            evaluate_python_code(code, static_tools=BASE_PYTHON_TOOLS, authorized_imports=self.authorized_imports)
         )
         return output
 
 
 class FinalAnswerTool(Tool):
     name = "final_answer"
     description = "Provides a final answer to the given problem."
-    inputs = {"answer": {"type": "text", "description": "The final answer to the problem"}}
+    inputs = {"answer": {"type": "any", "description": "The final answer to the problem"}}
     output_type = "any"
 
     def forward(self, answer):

src/transformers/agents/document_question_answering.py

@@ -31,7 +31,7 @@
 
 class DocumentQuestionAnsweringTool(PipelineTool):
     default_checkpoint = "naver-clova-ix/donut-base-finetuned-docvqa"
-    description = "This is a tool that answers a question about an document (pdf). It returns a text that contains the answer to the question."
+    description = "This is a tool that answers a question about an document (pdf). It returns a string that contains the answer to the question."
     name = "document_qa"
     pre_processor_class = AutoProcessor
     model_class = VisionEncoderDecoderModel
@@ -41,9 +41,9 @@ class DocumentQuestionAnsweringTool(PipelineTool):
             "type": "image",
             "description": "The image containing the information. Can be a PIL Image or a string path to the image.",
         },
-        "question": {"type": "text", "description": "The question in English"},
+        "question": {"type": "string", "description": "The question in English"},
     }
-    output_type = "text"
+    output_type = "string"
 
     def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
         if not is_vision_available():

src/transformers/agents/image_question_answering.py

@@ -38,9 +38,9 @@ class ImageQuestionAnsweringTool(PipelineTool):
             "type": "image",
             "description": "The image containing the information. Can be a PIL Image or a string path to the image.",
         },
-        "question": {"type": "text", "description": "The question in English"},
+        "question": {"type": "string", "description": "The question in English"},
     }
-    output_type = "text"
+    output_type = "string"
 
     def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
         requires_backends(self, ["vision"])

src/transformers/agents/prompts.py

@@ -199,7 +199,7 @@ def download_prompt(prompt_or_repo_id, agent_name, mode="run"):
 Action:
 {
   "action": "image_generator",
-  "action_input": {"text": ""A portrait of John Doe, a 55-year-old man living in Canada.""}
+  "action_input": {"prompt": "A portrait of John Doe, a 55-year-old man living in Canada."}
 }<end_action>
 Observation: "image.png"
 

src/transformers/agents/search.py

@@ -26,7 +26,7 @@ class DuckDuckGoSearchTool(Tool):
     name = "web_search"
     description = """Perform a web search based on your query (think a Google search) then returns the top search results as a list of dict elements.
     Each result has keys 'title', 'href' and 'body'."""
-    inputs = {"query": {"type": "text", "description": "The search query to perform."}}
+    inputs = {"query": {"type": "string", "description": "The search query to perform."}}
     output_type = "any"
 
     def forward(self, query: str) -> str:
@@ -45,11 +45,11 @@ class VisitWebpageTool(Tool):
     description = "Visits a wbepage at the given url and returns its content as a markdown string."
     inputs = {
         "url": {
-            "type": "text",
+            "type": "string",
             "description": "The url of the webpage to visit.",
         }
     }
-    output_type = "text"
+    output_type = "string"
 
     def forward(self, url: str) -> str:
         try:

src/transformers/agents/speech_to_text.py

@@ -27,7 +27,7 @@ class SpeechToTextTool(PipelineTool):
     model_class = WhisperForConditionalGeneration
 
     inputs = {"audio": {"type": "audio", "description": "The audio to transcribe"}}
-    output_type = "text"
+    output_type = "string"
 
     def encode(self, audio):
         return self.pre_processor(audio, return_tensors="pt")

src/transformers/agents/text_to_speech.py

@@ -36,7 +36,7 @@ class TextToSpeechTool(PipelineTool):
     model_class = SpeechT5ForTextToSpeech
     post_processor_class = SpeechT5HifiGan
 
-    inputs = {"text": {"type": "text", "description": "The text to read out loud (in English)"}}
+    inputs = {"text": {"type": "string", "description": "The text to read out loud (in English)"}}
     output_type = "audio"
 
     def setup(self):