arXiv AI

Adversarial Fast-Moving Real-World Domains as Test Beds for Benchmarking AI Scientist Capabilities

arXiv:2608. 03569v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Benchmarking the ability of AI scientists to generate novel ideas is notoriously difficult.

arXiv AI
Jun 11

Toward Generalist Autonomous Research via Hypothesis-Tree Refinement

arXiv:2606. 11926v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Scientific progress depends on a repeated loop of exploration, experimentation, and abstraction.

By Jiajie Jin, Yuyang Hu, Kai Qiu, Qi Dai, Chong Luo, Guanting Dong, Xiaoxi Li, Tong Zhao, Xiaolong Ma, Gongrui Zhang, Zhirong Wu, Bei Liu, Zhengyuan Yang, Linjie Li, Lijuan Wang, Hongjin Qian, Yutao Zhu, Zhicheng Dou
arXiv AI
Jul 9

Cost-Effective Agent Harnesses for Abstract Reasoning and Generalization on ARC-AGI-1

arXiv:2607. 06764v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent progress on ARC-AGI-1 from disclosed architectures has come broadly from two regimes: heavy test-time compute over frontier models (evolutionary search, exhaustive sampling, extended chain-of-thought), or benchmark-specific training in which small models are fine-tuned on ARC data, often with task-specialized architectures.

By Kabir Moghe, Peter Chin
arXiv AI
4d ago

Thinking Before Thinking: Scaling Agentic Inference Through Meta-Reasoning

The paper introduces agentic meta‑reasoning, a structured inference‑time framework that explicitly manages control decisions—such as selecting partial work, restarting, or stopping—during long‑horizon agentic tasks. By delegating task execution to workers and consolidating decisions through a lightweight controller that references persistent memory, the method reduces the need to replay full histories. Experiments on ProgramBench and other benchmarks show that meta‑reasoning improves performance over direct control baselines, especially as computation budgets increase, and reveals greater reuse of earlier work and higher solution coverage.

By Paras Dahal, Anton Bakhtin, Taco Cohen, Zhengxing Chen, Carole-Jean Wu, Rob Fergus, Scott Yih, Gabriel Synnaeve, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Sanjeev Arora, Jason Weston, Anirudh Goyal
arXiv AI
Sep 11

OpenDiscoveryTrace: Process Traces for Evaluating AI Scientist Workflows

OpenDiscoveryTrace is a public dataset of 558 complete AI scientific agent trajectories that records the reasoning process—thoughts, tool calls, observations, errors, revision triggers, and confidence—across 124 scientific tasks in drug discovery, materials science, genomics, and literature analysis. The dataset includes seven models (three frontier models and four open‑weight models) and 60 live‑retrieval variants, providing a balanced view of performance and error patterns. Pilot analysis shows that process traces reveal behavioral differences invisible to output‑only evaluation, such as differing error rates and types among frontier models.

By Aayam Bansal, Keertan Balaji
arXiv AI
Aug 19

ASI-Bench: At the Dawn of Artificial Superintelligence

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
arXiv AI
Aug 28

Learning the ARTS of Search for Automated Discovery

The paper introduces Agentic Reasoning for Tree Search (ARTS), a method that uses a reasoning language model to navigate the hypothesis‑experiment space in scientific discovery. Unlike traditional approaches that conflate hypothesis quality with execution quality and prune search logs, ARTS evaluates prior execution logs to distinguish implementation failures from poor hypotheses and selects the next hypothesis to pursue. By employing test‑time training to embed search‑tree knowledge into model weights, ARTS achieves a 15.3% relative improvement over leading algorithms on 22 benchmark tasks and enables smaller models like Qwen3‑4B to match or exceed the performance of larger closed‑source models at lower inference cost.

By Gurusha Juneja, Arnav Kumar Jain, Deepak Nathani, William Yang Wang, Xin Eric Wang
arXiv AI
Sep 25

AI in Science: Early Insights

The paper "AI in Science: Early Insights" analyzes AI’s impact on scientific work using data from 15 million Gemini interactions, 2,600 specialized AI models, and a survey of 600 scientists. It finds widespread AI adoption, complementary use of large language models and specialized tools, significant productivity gains of about seven hours per week, and a shift in research bottlenecks toward hypothesis backlog and verification needs. The study suggests AI can boost scientific productivity but its full effect depends on addressing new downstream challenges.

By Mihai Codreanu, Alex Imas, Juan Mateos-Garcia, Joseph Emmens, Evalyne Muiruri, Arthur Turrell, Julian Jacobs, Atoosa Kasirzadeh, Ana Trisovic, Yiyuan Chen, Tanya Rodchenko, Catherine Pollard, Scott Strand, Daniel Rock, Zanna Iscenko, Fabien Curto Millet, Neil Thompson, James Manyika