arXiv:2607. 24647v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI-driven autonomous research (AR) systems are becoming increasingly effective across a broad range of tasks.
arXiv:2606. 02863v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI-Driven Research Systems (ADRS) -- systems coupling LLMs with automated evaluation to discover algorithms, proofs, and designs -- are being optimized and adopted across domains, but the tools to analyze them have not kept pace.
arXiv:2609.25047v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous agents that automatically build artificial intelligence (AI) models could broaden access to AI across science and engineering. A popular lin...
arXiv:2606. 07074v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deep research agents have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex information-seeking tasks, yet this power comes at a steep computational cost.
The paper introduces AIDE^2, an AI research agent that recursively improves its own code by proposing, benchmarking, and selecting modifications. Over an eight‑day autonomous run, it achieved seven successive improvements—including new search policies and memory mechanisms—that transferred to four held‑out benchmarks in machine learning, algorithm engineering, and weather forecasting. The agent’s best version matched or outperformed a top human‑engineered production research agent and also reduced reward‑hacking rates, despite never optimizing for that metric.
arXiv:2608. 13940v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI research agents (AIRA) can now propose, implement, and evaluate their own machine learning experiments, but progress on frontier tasks is throttled by cost: a candidate solution can be written in minutes, whereas evaluating it can take hours to days of GPU time.
PrimeScientist is a system that jointly selects research directions and allocates resources for autonomous research agents. It models the problem as a sequential decision task, using an executable plan tree to track competing plans and an adaptive MCTS-based policy to balance exploration and exploitation based on remaining resources and experimental feedback. Experiments on AI research, systems, code optimization, and machine learning engineering show that PrimeScientist improves average reward by 10.3% while reducing research attempts by 50.6% compared to AutoResearch under the same budget.
The paper introduces ExTS, a tree‑search policy designed for budget‑constrained agentic search where evaluation and generation costs are high. ExTS treats expansion as a value‑of‑information decision, combining discriminative reward shaping, a stochastic virtual child, and quality‑conditioned branching to allocate budget more effectively. Experiments on prompt optimization, code generation, molecular structure elucidation, and agentic workflow optimization show ExTS matching or surpassing task‑specific baselines with an average gain of +5.5% using a single configuration, and the authors also present pilot‑run diagnostics to guide adaptation to different problem structures.
arXiv:2606. 11926v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Scientific progress depends on a repeated loop of exploration, experimentation, and abstraction.
The paper critiques the common practice of evaluating large‑language‑model (LLM) evolutionary search methods using a single seed and fixed iteration budget, arguing that this approach is insufficient. By testing three search strategies across five optimization tasks and varying both the number of seeds (width) and iterations (depth), the authors find that optimal budget allocation depends on the strategy, task, and total budget, and that strategy rankings shift with different budgets. They propose a measurement protocol that maps the seeds‑by‑iterations frontier and offers practical guidance for researchers.
arXiv:2608. 06714v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent systems for optimizing prompts, programs, and ML workflows typically rely on explicit outer-loop controllers such as evolutionary search, bandits, or textual-gradient methods.
arXiv:2608. 14354v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Enabling LLM agents to sustain productive, stable, and goal-aligned research over extended horizons is a central challenge for autonomous machine learning and scientific discovery, as progress hinges on continuously managing evolving state, exploration decisions, and computational resources.
arXiv:2609. 37968v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Advances in the coding capabilities of LLM agents allow them to inspect and modify their own instructions, tools, and execution procedures.