Egent: An Autonomous Agent for Equivalent Width Measurement

Abstract: We present Egent, an autonomous agent that combines classical multi-Voigt profile fitting with LLM visual inspection and iterative refinement. The fitting engine is built from scratch with minimal dependencies, creating an ecosystem where the LLM can reason about fits through function calls-adjusting wavelength windows, adding blend components, modifying continuum treatment, and flagging problematic cases. Egent operates directly on raw flux spectra without requiring pre-normalized continua. We validate against manual measurements from human experts using 18,615 lines from the C3PO program across 84 Magellan/MIKE spectra at SNR~50-250. We find per-spectrum systematic offsets between Egent and expert measurements, likely arising from differences in global continuum placement prior to manual fitting; after accounting for these offsets, the agreement is 5-7 milliangstrom. The LLM's primary role is quality control: it confirms good fits (~60-65% of lines are LLM-refined and accepted), flags problematic cases (~10-20%), and occasionally rescues edge cases where tool use improves fits. Agreement between GPT-5 and GPT-5-mini confirms reproducibility, with GPT-5-mini enabling low-cost analysis at ~200 lines per US dollar. Every fit stores complete Voigt parameters, continuum coefficients, and LLM reasoning chains, enabling exact reconstruction without re-running. Egent compresses what traditionally requires months of expert effort into days of automated analysis, enabling survey-scale EW measurement. We provide open-source code at https://github.com/tingyuansen/Egent, including a web interface for drag-and-drop analysis and a local LLM backend for fully offline operation on consumer hardware.