The paper introduces an experimental model‑class revision framework that jointly proposes structural edits to a hypothesis space and diagnostic experiments to test those edits. By coupling a class‑level distinguishability objective with anytime‑valid sequential evidence, the method only revises the model class after the current one is rejected. On 400 controlled dynamical environments, the approach achieves 89.5% exact recovery with 32 experiments, outperforming baselines and transferring well to unseen mechanisms, library insufficiency detection, and other benchmark tasks.
arXiv:2609.01526v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Scientific agents must learn not only how to reason, but also what to believe. However, existing LLM agents typically express scientific hypotheses in...
arXiv:2607. 28684v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing benchmarks for scientific equation discovery are largely composed of well-known equations available in the public domain, making it difficult to determine whether a model is discovering laws from data or merely recalling answers from its training corpus.
Predicting the answer to interventional ``what if'' questions --- the outcome of an action never taken --- requires a \emph{mechanistic}, causal model, not a curve fit; and learning such a model requires \emph{experiments}, because passive data leaves its mechanisms unidentified. Experiments are expensive, so the central problem is \emph{data efficiency}.
arXiv:2608. 09696v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Predicting the answer to interventional ``what if'' questions --- the outcome of an action never taken --- requires a \emph{mechanistic}, causal model, not a curve fit; and learning such a model requires \emph{experiments}, because passive data leaves its mechanisms unidentified.
arXiv:2607. 05682v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM systems for scientific discovery increasingly assist with ideation, literature synthesis, experiment planning, and report generation, but the first research question they propose can remain difficult to audit: it may sound plausible without exposing the mechanism, falsifier, or assumption that a scientist should inspect.
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...
arXiv:2607. 07379v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In agentic scientific machine learning (SciML), large language model (LLM) agents can discover surrogate models and select one by an automated score, typically an error metric.
The paper presents an explore‑then‑commit protocol that uses a large language model to generate hypotheses, a programmatic planner to collect measurements, and a fresh prompt to synthesize a scientific law from fixed observations. In 576 NewtonBench trials across 12 physics modules, the protocol—especially when interpreter‑enabled planners are used—reduces the number of measurements needed and improves root‑mean‑squared logarithmic error for both GPT‑4.1‑mini and GPT‑4.1. The study demonstrates measurement savings in every module, though it notes that the causal components and generalization beyond noiseless direct‑equation tasks remain unresolved.
The paper "Beyond Execution: Auditing Experimental Fidelity in LLM-Driven Scientific Research" argues that large language model agents must faithfully implement reference methods, design experiments that truly test claims, and provide supporting evidence. It reports that agents often hallucinate methodology—reducing datasets, substituting components, or drawing conclusions from limited resources—leading to false claims. To counter this, the authors introduce ABE‑Ralph, a reference‑anchored auditing framework that structures experimental constraints, guides implementation, and verifies results, achieving a 93% robust execution rate across 30 reproduction runs and matching or exceeding state‑of‑the‑art performance on 5 NatureBench tasks. "whyItMatters":"The study demonstrates that evaluating AI scientists requires more than code execution; it must ensure experimental design and evidence truly support the claimed scientific outcomes."
Draft-OPD introduces an on‑policy distillation method for speculative draft models, addressing the mismatch between supervised fine‑tuning and inference by letting the target model supervise the drafter on draft‑induced states. The approach uses target‑assisted rollouts for stable continuations and replays drafting from error positions exposed during verification, enabling the drafter to learn from both accepted and rejected proposals. Experiments demonstrate that Draft‑OPD achieves more than five‑fold lossless acceleration across diverse tasks, outperforming prior draft models such as EAGLE‑3 and DFlash by 23 % and 13 % respectively.
The paper proposes a distributional theory explaining how large language models (LLMs) incorporate external evidence into their decision-making process. It identifies three key predictions: (1) evidence is more persuasive when it aligns with the model’s prior beliefs, (2) models more readily accept errors from their own internal processes than from external sources, and (3) the same evidence can improve weaker models while harming stronger ones. Extensive experiments across ten million trials, twelve LLMs from four families, and eight domains—including quantum mechanics, physics, genetics, and molecular biology—confirm these predictions and reveal that evidence integration occurs late in the network as a structured sequence of steps rather than through a simple trust metric.