arXiv:2609.27490v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI research agents need reliable knowledge of how their experiments change outcomes. We introduce WhatWorkedBench to measure experimental understanding...
arXiv:2608.31076v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous scientific research agents are increasingly applied to end-to-end scientific workflows, including literature review, data analysis, experi...
Autonomous scientific research agents are increasingly applied to end-to-end scientific workflows, including literature review, data analysis, experimentation, and report generation. However, open-end...
The paper investigates how altering the harness—specifically the way a coding agent manages context and tool outputs—affects performance when the underlying model and task remain unchanged. Two harness configurations were compared on three coding benchmarks: a control that preserves the full conversation in order, and a treatment that mechanically shortens older tool results to keep the context tight. Across all benchmarks, the treatment increased the mean per‑task fail‑to‑pass fraction and, in some cases, the number of complete solutions, demonstrating that the harness itself can significantly influence a frozen model’s effectiveness.
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.
arXiv:2602. 11354v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The literature has witnessed an emerging interest in AI agents for automated assessment of scientific papers.
arXiv:2606. 26158v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When a benchmark's accuracy saturates, it is often retired and replaced with a more challenging version.
arXiv:2606. 22678v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Agentic coding harnesses - such as Agent-Skills, Superpowers, and Agent-Rigor - are increasingly deployed to augment underlying LLMs for real-world software engineering tasks.
arXiv:2607. 17100v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: An AI research agent can improve the score it sees without finding a modelling change that works on new materials.
arXiv:2607. 20468v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI agents are increasingly used to automate research and development tasks, yet existing benchmarks typically evaluate them on prescribed workflows or narrow action spaces.
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.
The paper argues that evaluating agents as fixed models is insufficient, proposing instead to treat them as configurable systems. Using a new benchmark of four scientific tasks, the authors analyze how five configuration aspects—task information, reasoning, self‑verification, time budget, and backbone model—affect performance, noting that about 54% of outcome variance arises from run‑to‑run differences even with the same settings. The study finds that providing more task information has the strongest impact, while interactions among settings (e.g., extra time only helps with adequate information or model capability) and the choice of verification tools significantly shape agent behavior.