NVAITC AI Scientist: A Governed End-to-End Research System -- A Hypertension GWAS Case Study
Authors: Eddie Huang, Ken Liao, Iven Fu, Yang-Hsien Lin, Chao-Shun Zhan, Andy Liao, Virginia Chen, Johnson Sun, +9 more
Organizations: NVIDIA AI Technology Center, NVIDIA Corporation · Department of Medical Research, China Medical University Hospital, Taichung, Taiwan · Master Program for Digital Health Innovation, China Medical University, Taichung, Taiwan · Laboratory for Statistical and Translational Genetics, RIKEN Center for Integrative Medical Sciences, Yokohama, Japan · AI-Driven Genomic Medicine and Drug Discovery Lab, China Medical University Hospital, Taichung, Taiwan · School of Chinese Medicine, China Medical University, Taichung, Taiwan · Division of Pediatric Genetics, Children's Hospital of China Medical University, Taichung, Taiwan · Department of Medical Laboratory Science and Biotechnology, Asia University, Taichung, Taiwan
Abstract
Agentic research systems are emerging as a new paradigm for coordinating scientific workflows beyond isolated model inference, code generation, or statistical analysis. However, deployment in institutional biomedical environments requires governed mechanisms for research planning, data access, workflow orchestration, evidence tracking, reproducibility, and human oversight. We present NVAITC AI Scientist (NAIS), a governed end-to-end agentic research system designed to support domain-general scientific workflows while keeping protected data within institutional privacy boundaries. NAIS integrates proposal review, execution planning, governed computational routing, reproducible workflow orchestration, evidence generation, and scientist-in-the-loop oversight. We validate NAIS in a real-world hypertension genome-wide association study (GWAS) using hospital-linked genotype and electronic health record (EHR) data from 286,422 individuals under an aggregate-only data policy. The agent planned cohort extraction, orchestrated GWAS execution, generated quality-control summaries, and drafted publication-oriented outputs. Human-AI review identified phenotype discrepancies and enabled iterative refinement of the hypertension definition. After reconciliation, the agent-orchestrated GWAS reproduced established hypertension loci, including FGF5, ATP2B1, CNNM2, FTO, and GRB14, with the strongest signal at FGF5 reaching −log10(p)∼70. As a secondary demonstration, NAIS also supported a drug-induced liver injury prediction workflow, achieving a multimodal graph neural network AUC of 0.842. These results demonstrate that governed agentic research systems can support scalable AI-assisted biomedical discovery while producing outputs comparable to expert-led workflows.
Scientific work increasingly spans heterogeneous artifacts -- papers, code, datasets, scientific file formats, model outputs, figures, manuscripts, and team decisions -- yet general-purpose AI assistants rarely preserve these objects as a coherent, auditable research state. We present SciForge, a multimodal research-native AI workbench that reserves the graphical interface for human judgment while search, parsing, model routing, workflow execution, plotting, writing, and presentation generation run as modular agent-accessible services. SciForge is built around five pillars: (i) \emph{goal-scoped scientific decision governance} for \textbf{goal-oriented} research, with review gates and shared review surfaces; (ii) \emph{translate-then-reason} for \textbf{multimodal} input, routing scientific objects through domain translators before the agent reasons; (iii) \emph{evidence governance} for \textbf{auditable} traceability, linking claims to provenance chains and audit findings; (iv) \emph{collaborative team science} for \textbf{collaborative} research, enabling multi-role decision governance, with shared team workspaces planned for future releases; and (v) \emph{real-world application scenarios} for \textbf{practical} impact, demonstrated through eight end-to-end user cases, with flagship demonstrations including multi-day agentic research sprints for gene discovery, AI-guided de novo protein design, molecular optimization, and genome-to-BGC discovery. The system combines a thin interaction layer, contextual research capability patterns, an Agent Runtime and Workflow Engine, an Evidence-DAG audit sidecar and a Scientific Model Router. SciForge currently runs as a desktop application, with mobile supervision support; future releases will deepen team collaboration. The system is open-source and available at https://github.com/AGI4Sci/SciForge
Scientific publication compresses a branching, iterative research process into a linear narrative, discarding the majority of what was discovered along the way. This compilation imposes two structural costs: a Storytelling Tax, where failed experiments, rejected hypotheses, and the branching exploration process are discarded to fit a linear narrative; and an Engineering Tax, where the gap between reviewer-sufficient prose and agent-sufficient specification leaves critical implementation details unwritten. Tolerable for human readers, these costs become critical when AI agents must understand, reproduce, and extend published work. We introduce the Agent-Native Research Artifact (ARA), a protocol that replaces the narrative paper with a machine-executable research package structured around four layers: scientific logic, executable code with full specifications, an exploration graph that preserves the failures compilation discards, and evidence grounding every claim in raw outputs. Three mechanisms support the ecosystem: a Live Research Manager that captures decisions and dead ends during ordinary development; an ARA Compiler that translates legacy PDFs and repos into ARAs; and an ARA-native review system that automates objective checks so human reviewers can focus on significance, novelty, and taste. On PaperBench and RE-Bench, ARA raises question-answering accuracy from 72.4% to 93.7% and reproduction success from 57.4% to 64.4%. On RE-Bench's five open-ended extension tasks, preserved failure traces in ARA accelerate progress, but can also constrain a capable agent from stepping outside the prior-run box depending on the agent's capabilities. Our code is open-sourced at https://github.com/Orchestra-Research/Agent-Native-Research-Artifact.
Recent advances in foundation models have enabled AI scientists to automate increasingly complete research workflows, from hypothesis generation and code execution to manuscript preparation. Yet workflow coverage alone does not provide access to the full evidence on which scientific discovery depends. Existing systems typically reason over text, code, labels, or precomputed summaries, leaving scientifically decisive spatial, temporal, cross-channel, and procedural relations unavailable to the agent. We introduce OmniScientist, an end-to-end, omni-modal AI scientist that conducts multidisciplinary research directly from heterogeneous raw evidence. A perception layer and 3 autonomous agents for ideation, experiment, and writeup operate within a deterministic pipeline, allowing observations to shape research questions, experimental decisions, and final claims throughout the research lifecycle. By running idea, rigour, and claim checks in code, the system enforces novelty screening, statistical validity, execution provenance, and numerical traceability. We evaluate OmniScientist on 36 real-data cases spanning 5 discipline families, 4 families of scientific evidence, and modalities including images, signals, audio, video, 3-D structures, trajectories, tables, formulae, and graphs. The system completes the full path from raw data to a compiled manuscript in all 36 cases and achieves a mean overall paper score of 6.3 with the reference reasoning backbone. In paired comparisons against a blind variant that receives only precomputed scalar features, direct perception improves all 7 evaluation dimensions and wins 85% of head-to-head judgments. These results show that lifecycle-wide perception is essential for evidence-grounded scientific discovery and provides a practical path toward broadly capable AI scientists.