Agents and Tokens: Multi-Agent Autonomous Reasoning over a Hydrodynamic Token Store

Abstract

Large language models and the agents built on them are the most capable reasoning machines ever built, and science is beginning to put them to work. Atmospheric and oceanic sciences are starting to see agentic integration, but coastal hydrodynamics remains largely untouched by AI. Simply, agents cannot easily read its data products without saturating their context windows. A time frame from a coastal model can hold hundreds of megabytes, and if the archive's chunking does not suit the query, the agent will spend more time downloading and compacting than gaining insights. After all, the archives were designed for storage, not for the fast, on-the-fly access agents need. Speech and music once hit the same wall. A minute of audio is millions of numbers, yet today's audio models hold conversations and write music. They "learned" to do this by "listening" to tokens. Neural audio codecs turn waveforms into short sequences of discrete symbols that a model reads like words and decodes back into sound. Coastal water is a similar signal: dense, finely sampled, and repeatable. We are convinced it has an analogous compact native representation that preserves the salient physics. Tokens are that representation: small integers, light enough for an agent to sweep six months of a coastline in seconds. Agents can then do more than simple lookup-related tasks; they can form and test their hypotheses as they explore the tokenized representation efficiently. Herein, we build this framework, using vector quantized variational autoencoders to compress tide level, the non-tidal residual, and surface wind speed into 16x16 grids of tokens along the US Atlantic and Gulf coasts. Agents traverse and explore these grids (e.g., tracking, spatiotemporal trend analysis) considerably faster than raw archives in both on-prem and off-prem modalities, while correctly answering several types of under-specified queries.