arXiv AI

Grounded autonomous research: a fault-tolerant LLM pipeline from corpus to manuscript in frontier computational physics

arXiv:2607. 02329v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous-research agents have demonstrated end-to-end LLM automation in machine-learning sandboxes where execution provides calibration.

arXiv AI
Jun 6

AutoDFT: A Closed-Loop Multi-Agent Framework for Autonomous DFT Calculations

arXiv:2605. 26179v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Density functional theory (DFT) serves as the basis for computational discovery in materials science and chemistry, yet each calculation demands extensive human effort: adjusting algorithms when convergence stalls, revising plans when unexpected physics emerges, and inserting steps as intermediate results reshape the problem.

By Penghui Yang, Zhonghan Zhang, Yue Li, Xinrun Wang, Yanchen Deng, Yuhao Lu, Bijun Tang, Zheng Liu, Bo An
arXiv AI
Jul 3

Grounded autonomous scrutiny at scale: emergent critique from reproduction of published computational physics papers

arXiv:2604. 12198v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Autonomous LLM agents now produce complete research artifacts in machine-learning sandboxes, but real computational physics is harder: experiments are first-principles calculations against re-runnable physical ground truth, and meaningful new work almost always builds on a key existing paper.

By Haonan Huang
arXiv AI
Aug 14

PhysMaster: Building an Autonomous AI Physicist for Theoretical and Computational Physics Research

arXiv:2512. 19799v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Advances in LLM reasoning and tool use have enabled agentic science, yet frontier theoretical and computational physics remains challenging because research requires deep domain expertise, long-horizon reasoning, and reliable numerical computation.

By Tingjia Miao, Wenkai Jin, Jinxin Tan, Muhua Zhang, Xianghe Pang, Zexi Liu, Yuwen Du, Tian Jin, Tu Guo, Zhengliang Zhang, Jingkun Liu, Yuelin Hu, Jiejun Zhang, Yunjie Huang, Yuhan Wang, Wenbo Li, Yinuo Gao, Shuo Chen, Rui Ye, Yuzhi Zhang, Linfeng Zhang, Kun Chen, Wei Wang, Weinan E, Siheng Chen
arXiv AI
Jun 18

Externalizing Research Synthesis and Validation in AI Scientists through a Research Harness

arXiv:2606. 18874v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI systems can increasingly automate scientific workflows, but the reasoning that links prior evidence, generated ideas, experiments and final claims often remains implicit inside model inference.

By Zijian Wang, Hanqi Li, Ziyue Yang, Zijian Hu, Shenghan Zuo, Yunzhe Zhang, Da Ma, Danyu Luo, Chenrun Wang, Jing Peng, Tiancheng Huang, Sijia Guo, Huayang Wang, Zichen Zhu, Senyu Han, Yilu Cao, Kai Yu, Lu Chen
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
arXiv AI
Sep 18

SCICONVBENCH: Benchmarking LLMs on Multi-Turn Clarification for Task Formulation in Computational Science

SCICONVBENCH is a benchmark designed to evaluate large language models (LLMs) on multi‑turn clarification tasks in computational science. It focuses on two key abilities: eliciting missing information (disambiguation) and resolving contradictory requests (inconsistency resolution) across four domains—fluid mechanics, solid mechanics, materials science, and partial differential equations. The benchmark pairs a structured task ontology with a rubric‑based evaluation framework, measuring LLM performance in clarification behavior, conversational grounding, and final‑specification fidelity, and reveals that even top models only resolve about 52.7% of disambiguation cases in fluid mechanics while often making ungrounded assumptions.

By Nithin Somasekharan, Youssef Hassan, Shiyao Lin, Gihan Panapitiya, Patrick Emami, Anurag Acharya, Sameera Horawalavithana, Shaowu Pan
arXiv AI
Jul 14

FIRE-Bench: Evaluating AI Agents on the Rediscovery of Scientific Insights

arXiv:2602. 02905v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Autonomous agents powered by large language models (LLMs) promise to accelerate scientific discovery end-to-end, but rigorously evaluating their capacity for verifiable discovery remains a central challenge.

By Zhen Wang, Fan Bai, Zhongyan Luo, Jinyan Su, Kaiser Sun, Xinle Yu, Jieyuan Liu, Kun Zhou, Claire Cardie, Mark Dredze, Zhiting Hu, Eric P. Xing