cs.AIMar 2, 2026

SciDER: Scientific Data-centric End-to-end Researcher

Authors: Ke Lin, Owais Aijaz, Yilin Lu, Yiyang Luo, Xuehang Guo, Preslav Nakov

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

Abstract

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.

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