ExplorationBench is a benchmark designed to evaluate AI systems’ ability to conduct scientific exploration in verifiable alien worlds, where rules are executable and can be precisely checked. It consists of two sandboxes—AlienCode and AlienLogic—each offering discovery targets, tasks, flawed manuals, environmental feedback, and tool‑call schemas. The benchmark tests whether systems can generate new hypotheses, design experiments, and iterate on results, rather than merely recalling pre‑trained knowledge, and finds that top performers can acquire and apply unfamiliar rules, though performance varies across exploration trajectories.
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:2601. 21754v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in language-based agentic tasks, their applicability to unseen, nonlinguistic environments (e.
By Haoyu Wang, Guozheng Ma, Shugang Cui, Yilun Kong, Haotian Luo, Li Shen, Mengya Gao, Yichao Wu, Xiaogang Wang, Dacheng Tao
arXiv:2606. 12736v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI agents are increasingly being developed to accelerate scientific discovery, yet their practical capabilities in real research settings remain poorly understood.
By Tianyu Liu, Allen Xin Wang, Antonia Panescu, Lisa Xinyi Chen, Wenxin Long, Xinyu Wei, Yueqian Jing, Ziyao Zeng, Jihang Chen, Sihan Jiang, Ziqing Wang, Siyi Gu, Siyu Chen, Xinyang Hu, Haoran Shao, Leqi Xu, Wangjie Zheng, Zhiyuan Cao, Ada Fang, Botao Yu, Kunyang Sun, Rex Ying, Arman Cohan, Qingyu Chen, Lingzhou Xue, Kaize Ding, Yuanqi Du, Wengong Jin, Zhuoran Yang, Marinka Zitnik, James Zou, Hua Xu, Hongyu Zhao
arXiv:2606. 29315v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to take actions in the real world and support human decision-making, yet most agents rely on parametric knowledge, fixed post-training data, retrieval, or search.
By Abhranil Chandra, Sankaran Vaidyanathan, Utsav Dhanuka, Varun Gandhi, Scott Niekum
Scientific datasets are commonly organized as hierarchical repositories containing heterogeneous and interdependent files, making their inspection, integration, and analysis labor-intensive and reliant on domain expertise. Although large language model (LLM) agents have advanced substantially in planning, reasoning, and tool use, existing research has largely overlooked their ability to interact with real scientific data assets through executable environments.