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
The article argues that agentic auto‑research should be guided by dense, intermediate signals of epistemic progress rather than by sparse final benchmarks. It compares this approach to fuzz testing, where coverage provides continuous feedback that directs input mutation. The authors propose controlled experiments to test whether such signals improve discovery efficiency and reduce false positives, and demonstrate in a simulated physics setting that an AI agent using feedback‑driven search uncovers a hidden law while optimization‑driven baselines fail.
By Yifeng He, Jicheng Wang, Yinzhe Zhao, Chengyang Shi, Jiachen Liu, Hao Chen
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:2409. 11363v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: AI agents have the potential to aid users on a variety of consequential tasks, including conducting scientific research.
By Zachary S. Siegel, Sayash Kapoor, Nitya Nadgir, Benedikt Stroebl, Arvind Narayanan
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
Scientific progress depends on a repeated loop of exploration, experimentation, and abstraction. Researchers test candidate directions, interpret the evidence, and carry the resulting lessons into later attempts.