# Research: Hermes Agent Capabilities

**Date:** 2026-04-19  
**Purpose:** Understand Hermes Agent framework for hackathon integration

## Hermes 3 (Nous Research)

### Core Capabilities
- **Advanced agentic capabilities**
- **Reliable function calling** - Trained specifically for tool use
- **Structured output** - JSON mode / Pydantic schemas
- **ChatML prompt format** - OpenAI-compatible
- Multi-turn conversation
- Long context coherence

### Benchmark Performance
| Benchmark | Hermes 3 Score |
|-----------|---------------|
| IFEval (0-shot) | 61.70% |
| MMLU-Redux | 92.7% |
| MMLU-Pro | 81.1% |
| SimpleQA | 31.0% |

### Function Calling
- Trained on specific prompts for tool use
- XML-based tool call format: `<tool_call>{"name": "...", "arguments": {...}}</tool_call>`
- Supports recursive/chain tool calls
- Native tool integration via NousResearch/Hermes-Function-Calling repo

## Hermes Agent Framework

### Key Components
1. **ChatML format** - Structured system/user/assistant turns
2. **Tool definitions** - JSON schema for function signatures
3. **Tool parsing** - Parse and execute function calls
4. **Response loop** - Multi-turn agentic execution

### Integration Points
- HuggingFace Transformers
- vLLM inference
- Ollama local deployment
- OpenAI-compatible API

## Sources
- https://huggingface.co/NousResearch/Hermes-3-Llama-3.1-8B
- https://github.com/NousResearch/Hermes-Function-Calling
- https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.11857 (Hermes 3 Technical Report)