Organizations: Data Science, College of William & Mary, Williamsburg, USA · Natural Language Processing, MBZUAI, Abu Dhabi, UAE · Computer Science, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA · Academy of Interdisciplinary Studies, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, China
While large language models accelerate scientific discovery, existing agents face severe limitations in adaptability, domain generalization, and multimodal scalability, often struggling to autonomously process raw, domain-specific experimental data. To overcome these barriers, we introduce SciDER, a multi-agent system designed to flexibly automate the entire research lifecycle. This framework employs a novel data-centric approach and integrates a dynamic multimodal skill system across four specialized sub-agents. Specifically, an ideation agent generates novel hypotheses via Evolutionary Idea Search, a data analysis agent systematically structures raw data, an experimentation agent synthesizes executable code grounded in dataset characteristics, and a critic agent drives iterative self-refinement. To democratize open-source scientific discovery, we release OpenSciDER-SFT-8K, a high-quality execution trajectory dataset, alongside the OpenSciDER-27B fine-tuned model. Across six benchmarks, SciDER and OpenSciDER obtain competitive or leading results, with especially strong gains on data-centric analysis, end-to-end research execution, and multimodal scientific visualization. By integrating data analysis with experimental execution, SciDER bridges the gap between abstract scientific reasoning and reproducible experimentation synthesis.
Figures & tables
Framework
Functionality
Capability
Deployment
Open Source
Ideation
Data
Experiment
Paper
Vision
Skill
Modular
Web UI
Package
Dataset
Model
AI Scientist [ 7 ]
✔
✘
✔
✔
✘
✘
✔
✘
✘
✘
✘
AI Scientist v2 [ 4 ]
✔
✘
✔
✔
✘
✘
✔
✘
✘
✘
✘
AI Researcher [ 8 ]
✔
✘
✔
✓✗
✘
✘
✔
✔
✘
✘
✘
Agent Laboratory [ 13 ]
✔
✓✗
✔
✓✗
✘
✘
✔
✔
✘
✘
✘
TinyScientist [ 14 ]
✔
✘
✔
✔
✘
✔
✔
✔
✔
✘
✘
TABLE I: Comparison of research agent frameworks.
Fig. 1: The system architecture of SciDER. The pipeline automates the research lifecycle through four multimodal specialized agents: Ideation, Data Analysis, Experimentation, and Critic. Inputs and skills are used to produce the final papers, code, and experimental results.
Agent role
#Traj.
Tokens
Tok./traj.
Main agents
experiment
947
235.0 M
248.2 k
data
555
118.8 M
214.0 k
ideation
430
15.0 M
34.9 k
Subagents
coding
2,610
122.6 M
47.0 k
TABLE II: Statistics of OpenSciDER-SFT-8K trajectories by agent role.
Method
Quality
Novelty
Feas.
Motiv.
Exp.
Motiv.
Exp.
SCIPIP [ 36 ]
2.44
-
25.06
-
-
VIRSC [ 37 ]
2.94
2.12
24.87
24.65
13.3
AI-Researcher [ 8 ]
3.56
3.02
34.92
34.69
18.3
AI-Scientist [ 7 ]
3.63
3.28
39.03
36.08
15.7
AI-Scientist-v2 [ 4 ]
4.24
3.71
44.77
42.31
22.5
TABLE III: Results of AI-Idea-Bench .
Method
Model
Accuracy
DataVoyager [ 39 ]
Claude-Sonnet-4
0.257
Asta-v0 [ 40 ]
Claude-Sonnet-4
0.332
SciDER
Gemini-3-Flash
0.274
SciDER
Claude-Sonnet-4
0.354
SciDER
OpenSciDER-27B
0.315
TABLE IV: Results of DiscoveryBench .
Method
Model
MLE-Bench (Lite)
%Any ↑
%Gold ↑
AIDE [ 44 ]
o1-Preview
16.90
9.40
ML-Master [ 43 ]
Deepseek-R1
48.50
18.10
AIRA [ 42 ]
o3-Preview
47.73
28.64
AIRA [ 42 ]
Gemini-3-Pro
56.89
37.16
SciDER
Gemini-3-Pro
63.64
40.90
TABLE V: Results of MLE-Bench on the Lite split.
Fig. 2: Results of SciCode . Solve rates for main and subproblems are reported, with higher rates indicating greater domain-specific capability.
Method
Model
Score
ReAct [ 46 ]
o3-Mini
0.391
ReAct [ 46 ]
GPT-OSS-120B
0.402
AIRA [ 42 ]
o3
0.424
AIRA [ 42 ]
GPT-5
0.550
SciDER
Claude-Sonnet-4
0.780
SciDER
OpenSciDER-27B
0.519
TABLE VI: Results of AIRS-Bench .
Fig. 3: Results of AstroVisBench . Correct, Failure, Minor Error, and Major Error rates are reported.
Fig. 4: Ablation Study of EIS and Data Analysis: (a) Impact of EIS on AI-Idea-Bench quality, novelty, and feasibility. (b) Impact of Data Analysis on DiscoveryBench accuracy in different tasks.
Fig. 5: Selected generated pages showcasing end-to-end scientific discovery evidence for “Student-Conditioned Evidential Meta-Learning with Hyper-Conditioned Priors for Calibrated Few-Shot Knowledge Tracing” . The tiled pages show the generated paper, covering the method, experiments, quantitative results, calibration analysis, limitations, and ethics discussion.
Fig. 6: Qualitative generated examples from AstroVisBench . Utilizing an iterative multimodal feedback loop, SciDER successfully synthesizes and refines complex astronomical visualizations, accurately handling long-tail APIs and domain-specific formatting.
Score Level
Evaluation Criteria (Helpfulness)
1 – Obstacle
Fails to parse data or produces non-executable code; requires total restart.
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. We introduce Deep Scientific Data Exploration, an agentic task paradigm in which agents navigate repositories, interpret heterogeneous files and schemas, execute analyses, integrate cross-file evidence, and produce conclusions grounded in executed observations. To operationalize this paradigm, we present SciDataSailor, a framework for synthesizing tool-interactive trajectories by balancing broad exploration with targeted exploitation. SciDataSailor instantiates trajectory synthesis as Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) with four task-specific mechanisms: difficulty-stratified exploration seeds, dual-feedback first-play urgency, hierarchical strategy-to-tool action generation, and entropy-guided branching. Using this framework, we construct SciDataSailor-SFT-2K for supervised fine-tuning and SciDataSailor-Bench for evaluation, with the latter comprising 627 meta-information summarization tasks and 586 scientific question-answering tasks across 27 datasets spanning the life, earth, and physical sciences.
Jiyong Rao, Yicheng Qiu, Chi Zhang +2
Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory · Tongji University
Frontier scientific reasoning is rapidly emerging as a key foundation for advancing AI agents in automated scientific discovery. Deep research agents offer a promising approach to this challenge. These models develop robust problem-solving capabilities through post-training on information-seeking tasks, which are typically curated via knowledge graph construction or iterative web browsing. However, these strategies face inherent limitations in frontier science, where domain-specific knowledge is scattered across sparse and heterogeneous academic sources, and problem solving requires sophisticated computation and reasoning far beyond factual recall. To bridge this gap, we introduce SciResearcher, a fully automated agentic framework for frontier-science data construction. SciResearcher synthesizes diverse conceptual and computational tasks grounded in academic evidence, while eliciting information acquisition, tool-integrated reasoning, and long-horizon capabilities. Leveraging the curated data for supervised fine-tuning and agentic reinforcement learning, we develop SciResearcher-8B, an agent foundation model that achieves 19.46% on the HLE-Bio/Chem-Gold benchmark, establishing a new state of the art at its parameter scale and surpassing several larger proprietary agents. It further achieves 13-15% absolute gains on SuperGPQA-Hard-Biology and TRQA-Literature benchmarks. Overall, SciResearcher introduces a new paradigm for automated data construction for frontier scientific reasoning and offers a scalable path toward future scientific agents.
Current Autonomous Scientific Research (ASR) systems, despite leveraging large language models (LLMs) and agentic architectures, remain constrained by fixed workflows and toolsets that prevent adaptation to evolving tasks and environments. We introduce Mimosa, an evolving multi-agent framework that automatically synthesizes task-specific multi-agent workflows and iteratively refines them through experimental feedback. Mimosa leverages the Model Context Protocol (MCP) for dynamic tool discovery, generates workflow topologies via a meta-orchestrator, executes subtasks through code-generating agents that invoke available tools and scientific software libraries, and scores executions with an LLM-based judge whose feedback drives workflow refinement. On ScienceAgentBench, Mimosa achieves a success rate of 43.1% with DeepSeek-V3.2, surpassing both single-agent baselines and static multi-agent configurations. Our results further reveal that models respond heterogeneously to multi-agent decomposition and iterative learning, indicating that the benefits of workflow evolution depend on the capabilities of the underlying execution model. Beyond these benchmarks, Mimosa modular architecture and tool-agnostic design make it readily extensible, and its fully logged execution traces and archived workflows support auditability by preserving every analytical step for inspection and potential replication. Combined with domain-expert guidance, the framework has the potential to automate a broad range of computationally accessible scientific tasks across disciplines. Released as a fully open-source platform, Mimosa aims to provide an open foundation for community-driven ASR.
Martin Legrand, Tao Jiang, Matthieu Feraud +5
Université Côte d’Azur, CNRS, ICN, Nice, France · Interdisciplinary Institute for Artificial Intelligence (3iA) Côte d’Azur, Sophia-Antipolis, France · Inria, Université Côte d’Azur, CNRS, I3S, France