arXiv AI

Evaluating and improving AI agents for sequencing protocol understanding

The paper introduces LibStructBench, a document‑grounded benchmark designed to assess whether AI agents can accurately reconstruct sequencing‑library structures and molecular workflows from protocols. Experiments reveal that current state‑of‑the‑art agents often generate roughly correct reconstructions but struggle with exact molecular‑state representation and workflow connectivity. The study also finds that changing the underlying language model yields larger performance differences than changing agent harnesses, and that additional knowledge only modestly improves oligo‑family recovery without affecting overall workflow accuracy.

arXiv AI
Aug 5

MDArena: Evaluating Coding Agents on Realistic Molecular Dynamics Workflows

arXiv:2608. 02642v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accelerating scientific discovery is among the most consequential applications of AI, and computational biomolecular simulation stands out as a particularly promising target within this broader effort.

By Nithishwer Mouroug Anand, Wei-Tse Hsu, Kyle Vaccaro, Eden James Gage, Jonathan David Colburn, Linda Xi Phan, Minjoon Seo, Kevin Guan, Philip C. Biggin
arXiv AI
Oct 27

BenchBench-Cloning: Evaluating Molecular Cloning Design and Protocol Development

BenchBench‑Cloning is a new benchmark for evaluating large language models on end‑to‑end molecular cloning tasks. It contains 65 tasks drawn from real sequence records, laboratory notebooks, and published studies, split into 50 protocol‑development tasks and 15 construct‑design tasks. Performance is measured by simulation execution for protocols and deterministic or rubric‑based checks for design, with GPT‑6 Astra achieving the highest score of 30.6% among eight tested systems.

By Aditya Sivakumar, Peter Ciaccia, Hassaan Qadir, Ian Hsu, Ashu Singhal
arXiv AI
Oct 31

MoLRSI: A Recursive Self-Improving AI agent for Molecular Discovery

MoLRSI is a recursive self‑improving AI agent designed for molecular discovery that optimizes both workflow and model architecture using persistent cross‑task memory. It refines its search policy based on workflow performance, refinement outcomes, and execution feedback, enabling continuous improvement. In antibiotic discovery, MoLRSI achieved a 15.9% experimental hit rate versus 8.7% for an expert‑led workflow, and in de novo peptide‑MHC binder design it produced eight validated hits with preferential binding, outperforming a baseline approach.

By Yikun Zhang, Xiwei Cheng, Mingze Yuan, Yu Zhang, Brian Shim, Aarti Krishnan, Daniel Rosen, Kunyang Sun, Yingze Wang, Zhenfeng Deng, Botao Yu, Bingxu Liu, David Liu, Tianyu Liu, Yuanqi Du, Nir Hacohen, James J. Collins, Wengong Jin
arXiv AI
Oct 2

R-GroundBench: A Diagnostic Benchmark for R-Group Groundingin Markush Molecular Editing

R-GroundBench is a new diagnostic benchmark for evaluating AI models on R‑group grounding in Markush molecular editing, derived from real pharmaceutical patents. It includes a Multiple‑Choice VQA track with varying difficulty and modality splits, as well as an open‑ended Generation track. Experiments show a large performance gap: models score over 90% on easy VQA but drop to 56–66% on hard VQA, and generation exact match stays below 20% (and under 8% with visual input).

By Xin Wang, Zichuan Ying, Xinna Lin, Junqi Zhang, Hanyi Xiong, Tianyu Gao, Hairong Zhang, Qixiang Hua, Botian Shi, Zhenhailong Wang, Kaicheng Yu
arXiv AI
Sep 24

MolDesignBench: Evaluating LLM-based Agent for Scenario-grounded Molecular Design

MolDesignBench is a new benchmark for evaluating large language model (LLM)-based agents in scenario‑grounded molecular design. It contains 2,000 generation and optimization tasks that blend implicit narrative requirements with explicit property and functional‑group constraints, including infeasible cases, and require the use of 17 specialized chemistry tools. Experiments with leading LLMs show low success rates (best ~43%) and highlight failures in implicit‑constraint reasoning, infeasibility detection, and tool usage, underscoring the benchmark’s role in identifying key bottlenecks for future research.

By Yongjun Jeong, Hanbum Ko, Ye Rin Kim, Chanhui Lee, Rodrigo Hormazabal, Jaewan Lee, Sehui Han, Sungbin Lim, Sungwoong Kim
arXiv AI
Sep 25

BaseCamp --- An Agentic AI Framework for Automating DNA Sequencing Data Pipelines

BaseCamp is an agentic AI framework that automates the decision layer of DNA sequencing pipelines by deploying six specialized AI agents for tasks such as sample intake, quality control, alignment, variant calling, annotation, cross‑stage monitoring, and reporting. The agents rely on established bioinformatics tools for actual sequence analysis, while using fine‑tuned, domain‑specialized large language models to select, configure, and interpret these tools’ outputs, ensuring reproducibility and local data privacy. Evaluation demonstrates that the agents’ configurations align with expert practice, provide an explicit filtering ledger for traceability, and detect anomalies that traditional monitoring may miss.

By Eranga Bandara, Xueping Liang, Asanga Gunaratna, Tharaka Hewa, Abdul Rahman, Peter Foytik, Safdar H. Bouk, Sachini Rajapakse, Isurunima Kularathna, Pramoda Karunarathna, Chalani Rajapakse, Ng Wee Keong, Kasun De Zoysa, Amin Hass, Wathsala Herath, Ross Gore, Ravi Mukkamala, Nihal Siriwardanagea, Gihan Siriwardanagea, Aruna Withanage, Nilaan Loganathan, Sachin Shetty