arXiv AI
Oct 16

Sci$\Pi$vot: Benchmarking Principal-Investigator Judgment at Pivotal Moments of Scientific AutoResearch Agents

Sciπvot is a 248‑case benchmark that evaluates how well large language model (LLM) agents perform scientific judgment during autonomous research. The benchmark is built from six months of real‑world experiments where senior researchers ran LLM agents on 26 projects across six scientific fields and repeatedly corrected the agents’ decisions. In each case, the agent must choose between its original plan and a human‑corrected alternative using only the project record available before the correction, allowing a direct comparison of LLM and human performance under varying reasoning effort and record access.

By Youran Sun, Xingyu Ren, Chugang Yi, Kejia Zhang, Di Wu, Yingkang Cao, Allen Zhou, Jianping Ye, Suying Liu, Jiaxuan Guo, Jianda Du, Weicheng Ye, Kecheng Liu, Hefan Zhang, Haixin Wang, Jie Xiao, Eric Yang, Haizhao Yang
arXiv AI
Sep 17

Rethinking Domain Specialization for Open-Ended Scientific Reasoning in Astronomy Language Models

The paper investigates whether domain-specific fine‑tuning benefits open‑ended scientific reasoning in astronomy. Using a curated 300‑question QA benchmark from 2017–2026 Olympiad‑style materials, the authors compare open‑weight, API‑served general‑purpose, multimodal, and astronomy‑specialized language models. Results show that strong general‑purpose models set the highest correctness baseline, but variations in metric agreement, judge sensitivity, benchmark composition, and modality suggest that domain specialization is task‑ and deployment‑dependent and that domain‑specific evaluation is crucial for scientific workflows.

By Vanessa Lama, Sanjay Das, Emily Herron, Yuan-Sen Ting, Tijmen de Haan, Junqi Yin, Tirthankar Ghosal, Feiyi Wang
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 26

SCI-AGENT-EXAM: Benchmarking Agents on Scientific Research Tasks

arXiv:2610.32441v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly capable of supporting scientific workflows, but their capabilities across diverse research activitie...

By Tianyun Zhong, Wei Wang, Jialin Li, Jianhong Tu, Liyao Li, Chuqiao Kuang, Tianshi Zheng, Songchi Zhou, Weiqi Zhai, Qile Jin, Jiajia Li, Jiasheng Zheng, Boxi Cao, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Shiwei Ye, Bing Zhao, Hu Wei, Lin Qu, Xianpei Han
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 25

JevOut: Natural Context Can Flip Decision Models

JevOut demonstrates that natural, short additions to the context of decision models can flip their outputs from correct to incorrect, even when the correct answer remains unchanged. By optimizing context additions while keeping the source, question, choices, and gold answer fixed, the study found that 61.4% of initially correct decisions were redirected to a wrong option, with 45% receiving high confidence. Similar fragility was observed across three other decision systems on seven datasets, with flip rates between 64.9% and 73.2%.

By Zixiang Xu