ExplorationBench is a new benchmark designed to evaluate AI systems’ ability to conduct scientific exploration in verifiable alien worlds. It comprises two sandbox environments—AlienCode and AlienLogic—each containing discovery targets, tasks, flawed manuals, and tool‑call schemas that force systems to formulate hypotheses, design experiments, and iterate on results. Ten AI systems were tested, revealing that while the best performers can learn and apply unfamiliar rules, their progress varies across exploration trajectories and can even regress with continued exploration.
By Ming Zhang, Zhenghao Xiang, Peizhong Gao, Yujiong Shen, Yuhui Wang, Zhonghan Yue, Shihan Dou, Zhangyue Yin, Junjie Ye, Shichun Liu, Weihuang Zheng, Jiahao Chen, Jiayi Chen, Hongzhang Liu, Jiaqi Shao, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang, Suncong Zheng, Maxm Pan
arXiv:2601. 21754v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in language-based agentic tasks, their applicability to unseen, nonlinguistic environments (e.
By Haoyu Wang, Guozheng Ma, Shugang Cui, Yilun Kong, Haotian Luo, Li Shen, Mengya Gao, Yichao Wu, Xiaogang Wang, Dacheng Tao
arXiv:2606. 29315v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to take actions in the real world and support human decision-making, yet most agents rely on parametric knowledge, fixed post-training data, retrieval, or search.
By Abhranil Chandra, Sankaran Vaidyanathan, Utsav Dhanuka, Varun Gandhi, Scott Niekum
Scientific datasets are commonly organized as hierarchical repositories containing heterogeneous and interdependent files, making their inspection, integration, and analysis labor-intensive and reliant on domain expertise. Although large language model (LLM) agents have advanced substantially in planning, reasoning, and tool use, existing research has largely overlooked their ability to interact with real scientific data assets through executable environments.
arXiv:2606. 12736v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI agents are increasingly being developed to accelerate scientific discovery, yet their practical capabilities in real research settings remain poorly understood.
By Tianyu Liu, Allen Xin Wang, Antonia Panescu, Lisa Xinyi Chen, Wenxin Long, Xinyu Wei, Yueqian Jing, Ziyao Zeng, Jihang Chen, Sihan Jiang, Ziqing Wang, Siyi Gu, Siyu Chen, Xinyang Hu, Haoran Shao, Leqi Xu, Wangjie Zheng, Zhiyuan Cao, Ada Fang, Botao Yu, Kunyang Sun, Rex Ying, Arman Cohan, Qingyu Chen, Lingzhou Xue, Kaize Ding, Yuanqi Du, Wengong Jin, Zhuoran Yang, Marinka Zitnik, James Zou, Hua Xu, Hongyu Zhao
ASI‑Bench is a new benchmark that evaluates AI systems on their ability to conduct innovative exploration and autonomous scientific research across 11 domains, using 60 project‑level tasks. It progressively removes human methodological guidance to test whether AI can independently select methods, execute research, and produce verifiable results. Results from 18 state‑of‑the‑art agent–model configurations show a sharp performance drop when guidance is reduced, indicating current systems still rely heavily on human input.
By Junwei Zhou, Zhen Sun, Binyu Li, Jiangyu Zhou, Yuexi Pan, Hengyu Wang, Honghe Ren, Xiaohan Jia, Xueyang Zhou, Xiaoyu Cao, Yongchao Chen, Yuanning Feng, Junhao Wu, Cheng Zhang, Sijia Chen, Haoyu Xue, Chengsong You, Huan Wang, Koutian Wu, Peigan Gao, Jiakun Wu, Wenzhe Li, Ergan Shang, Qingyuan Zheng, Jingjing Zhou, Ruixuan Jia, Yan Xu, Hongrui Zhang, Xiao-Han Ma, Zhengxiang Cheng, Yuexing Hao, Liting Mai, Xianglin Ji, Wenjun Zhang, Zhuofan Chen, Yixiao Huang, Chi Wang, Wenyue Hua, Yilun Hao, Yuantao Zhai, Ziyan Zhao, Jingyan Xie
The paper introduces Strategy Accumulation and Guided Execution (SAGE), a two-stage framework that makes automated fine-tuning of large language models cumulative. In the first stage, a multi-agent pipeline uses Monte Carlo Tree Search to explore training strategies while a Distillation Agent records task-specific insights and cross-task confidence scores into a structured repository. In the second stage, SAGE retrieves relevant experience from this repository to guide training on new tasks, achieving a 12.4‑percentage‑point improvement over a baseline pipeline without accumulated experience on nine unseen tasks.
By Haoran Zhao, Wei Du, Dingwen Yang, Jixuan Huang, Junlin Shang, Lingyong Fang, Ya Guo, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
arXiv:2608.28638v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Agent skills are portable packages of instructions and resources an agent consults at deployment. Self-evolving them fails in two ways today. First, sk...
By Jiale Liu, Pinze Ren, Yuqi Xia, Huan Wang, Zhenlin Zhao, Siming Dong
arXiv:2604. 19341v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Scientific discovery often requires many cycles of proposing, testing, and refining candidate solutions.
By Haotian Ye, Haowei Lin, Jingyi Tang, Yizhen Luo, Rahul Thapa, Caiyin Yang, Chang Su, Rui Yang, Ruihua Liu, Rundao Li, Zeyu Li, Pengwei Sun, Chong Gao, Dachao Ding, Guangrong He, Miaolei Zhang, Lina Sun, Wenyang Wang, Yuchen Zhong, Zhuohao Shen, Puheng Li, Pan Lu, Bianxiao Cui, Di He, Jianzhu Ma, Junfeng Li, Hexi Baoyin, Yejin Choi, Stefano Ermon, Xiaowen Chu, Tongyang Li, Yuzhi Xu, James Zou
MineExplorer is a benchmark designed to assess the open‑world exploration abilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) in Minecraft. It filters out tasks that rely heavily on Minecraft‑specific knowledge, organizes tasks into ReAct‑style capabilities, and composes atomic tasks into implicit multi‑hop challenges. A multi‑agent synthesis workflow creates reliable task graphs, sandbox scenes, and rule‑based milestone evaluators, and human evaluation confirms its superiority over a single‑agent baseline. Experiments show that while advanced MLLMs can handle many single‑hop tasks, they struggle with longer trajectories that require coordinating hidden prerequisites, and larger models or different thinking modes do not consistently improve performance.
By Tianjie Ju, Yueqing Sun, Zheng Wu, Wei Zhang, Yaqi Huo, Xi Su, Qi Gu, Xunliang Cai, Gongshen Liu, Zhuosheng Zhang
arXiv:2606. 07591v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI coding agents are increasingly used for scientific work, but their end-to-end autonomous research capability remains difficult to verify.
By Wanghan Xu, Shuo Li, Tianlin Ye, Qinglong Cao, Yixin Chen, Hengjian Gao, Yiheng Wang, Qi Li, Kun Li, Sheng Xu, Shengdu Chai, Fangchen Yu, Xiangyu Zhao, Zhangrui Zhao, Weijie Ma, Zijie Guo, Haoyu Zhou, Haoxiang Yin, Lixue Cheng, Chaofan Hu, Haoxuan Li, Lu Mi, Xuxuan Xie, Yifan Zhou, Ruizhe Chen, Zhiwang Zhou, Xingjian Guo, Yuhao Zhou, Xuming He, Shengyuan Xu, Xinyu Gu, Jiamin Wu, Mianxin Liu, Chunfeng Song, Fenghua Ling, Dongzhan Zhou, Shixiang Tang, Yuqiang Li, Mao Su, Peng Ye, Siqi Sun, Bin Wang, Xue Yang, Zhenfei Yin, Tianfan Fu, Guangtao Zhai, Wanli Ouyang, Bo Zhang, Lei Bai, Wenlong Zhang
arXiv:2608. 05628v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Although agent skills equip LLMs with reusable procedural knowledge, manual maintenance suffers from high costs, unscalability, and misalignment.
By Yuru Feng, Yaoqi Chen, Beidi Zhao, Qianxi Zhang, Xinjiang Wang, Jianan Lu, Zhirui Wang, Shusen Xu, Zengzhong Li, Qi Chen