arXiv AI

Letting AI Formulate the Research Question: Autonomous Research Agents

The paper reports on an autonomous research system that allows an AI agent to formulate its own research question, screen for failure modes, and obtain critiques from a separate model before writing a paper. Over 13 development runs, minor changes in the initial instruction document caused significant shifts in the topics explored, ultimately leading to a new technology applied to a societal problem. Five fully autonomous runs produced reproducible papers that were reviewed by external AI reviewers at workshop level, with all data and code released for replication.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 30

Can AI agents conduct open-ended AI research? Early evidence from two case studies

arXiv:2607. 27191v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Forecasts of explosive AI progress hinge on AI agents automating AI research.

By Peter Kirgis, Sayash Kapoor, Andrew Schwartz, Stephan Rabanser, David Africa, Konstantinos Voudouris, Viet Nguyen, Toby Pilditch, Magda Dubois, Harry Coppock, Cozmin Ududec, Nitya Nadgir, Matilda Orona, Tilman Bayer, Derrick Chan-Sew, Yue Ling, Abhishek Shetty, Helen Toner, Gillian Hadfield, Seth Lazar, Steve Newman, Shoshannah Tekofsky, Rishi Bommasani, Arvind Narayanan
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 16

PaperDoctor: Evidence-Grounded and Actionable Feedback for Scientific Papers in Progress

PaperDoctor is an agent framework that provides evidence‑grounded, actionable feedback for scientific papers before submission. It evaluates writing, layout, references, code, theory, prior work, and experiments through a three‑layer hierarchical system, linking each critique to specific evidence and revision suggestions. The system selectively rebuilds and reruns experiments to uncover reproducibility gaps, and an interactive interface lets authors explore findings tied to their manuscript.

By Kevin Qinghong Lin, Siyuan Hu, Pan Lu, Yu Chen, Yanzhe Chen, Owen Queen, Yupeng Chen, Jialin Yu, Junchi Yu, Zifeng Ding, Yuanfeng Ji, Sheng Liu, Jindong Gu, Linjie Li, Mike Zheng Shou, Philip Torr, James Zou
arXiv AI
Jul 21

AI for Auto-Research: Roadmap & User Guide

arXiv:2605. 18661v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: AI-assisted research is crossing a threshold: fully automated systems can now generate research papers for as little as $15, while long-horizon agents can execute experiments, draft manuscripts, and simulate critique with minimal human input.

By Lingdong Kong, Xian Sun, Wei Chow, Linfeng Li, Kevin Qinghong Lin, Xuan Billy Zhang, Song Wang, Rong Li, Qing Wu, Wei Gao, Yingshuo Wang, Shaoyuan Xie, Jiachen Liu, Leigang Qu, Shijie Li, Lai Xing Ng, Benoit R. Cottereau, Ziwei Liu, Tat-Seng Chua, Wei Tsang Ooi
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 22

Checkpoints Are Not Enough: Trust Calibration in CoSLR, a Human-AI System for Systematic Literature Reviews

The paper introduces CoSLR, a Human‑AI collaborative system for systematic literature reviews that incorporates mandatory human checkpoints within a three‑phase pipeline using large language models and Retrieval‑Augmented Generation. In a survey of 63 participants, 42.9 % rated the system’s usability highly, yet 34.9 % indicated they would trust AI‑generated summaries without further human verification after brief interaction. The study highlights that effective human oversight in AI‑assisted literature reviews depends on users’ willingness to engage with the checkpoints, underscoring a calibration issue that interface design must directly address.

By MD Aidul Islam, Malik Abdul Sami, Muhammad Waseem, Zeeshan Rasheed, Kai-kristian Kemell, Zheying Zhang, Pekka Abrahamsson
arXiv AI
Jun 8

Act As a Real Researcher: A Suite of Benchmarks Evaluating Frontier LLMs and Agentic Harnesses in Research Lifecycle

arXiv:2606. 07462v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As foundation models advance and agent scaffolding becomes increasingly sophisticated, agents have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in complex, long-horizon coding tasks and even autonomous experiment execution.

By Jiayu Wang, Weijiang Lv, Bowen Fu, Jing Fu, Jiayi Song, Lingyu Zhang, Lanxuan Xue, Luodi Chen, Zepeng Xin, Kaiyu Li, Xiangyong Cao
arXiv AI
Sep 3

Can Coding Agents Reproduce Findings in Computational Materials Science?

The paper introduces AutoMat, a benchmark designed to test large language model (LLM) coding agents on their ability to reproduce claims from computational materials science. AutoMat presents three challenges: reconstructing underspecified procedures, navigating specialized toolchains, and assessing whether the evidence supports a claim. Experiments show that current LLM agents achieve low success rates, with the best setting reaching only 53%, and failures stem mainly from incomplete procedures, methodological deviations, and execution fragility.

By Ziyang Huang, Yi Cao, Ali K. Shargh, Jing Luo, Ruidong Mei, Mohd Zaki, Zhan Liu, Wyatt Bunstine, William Jurayj, Somdatta Goswami, Tyrel McQueen, Michael Shields, Jaafar El-Awady, Paulette Clancy, Benjamin Van Durme, Nicholas Andrews, William Walden, Daniel Khashabi