cs.LGSep 16, 2026

Autonomous Research Project Management as an Agent Skill: A Case Study in Exact Spectral Spatial Regression

Authors: Alexander Chen, Jeffrey Meng, Bram Hoex, Tong Xie

Organizations: University of New South Wales · School of Photovoltaic and Renewable Energy Engineering University of New South Wales Kensington, NSW, Australia · GreenDynamics · GreenDynamics Kensington, NSW, Australia

Abstract

This work presents an end-to-end demonstration of autonomous machine learning research conducted by an agent skill on consumer hardware. The demonstration evaluates an FFT-based Kernel Ridge Regression (KRR) solver for regular spatial grids using 2005 monthly NOAA Kaplan SST v2 anomaly fields on a 36×7236 \times 72 grid. This was autonomously executed by DeepSeek V4 Flash, orchestrated by our agent skill suite within DeepSeek Harness (DSH). Experiments were executed on CPU-only hardware (Apple M2 Pro; 78.7 s solver time, 1.57 GB peak RSS). Long-horizon state was decoupled into a file-based epic- and issue-tracking substrate. Across 74 sub-agent sessions, the agent demonstrated closed-loop scientific resilience: routing two failed hypothesis review gates back to literature retrieval, patching bootstrap indexing bugs, and executing with only four discrete human steering events. Finally, we reflect on autonomous research governance, arguing that scientific credibility requires inspectable state, falsifiable review gates, and transparent reporting of negative results, urging the machine learning community to favour agent-accessible structured formats over static PDF manuscripts.

Figures & tables

Explore similar work

Aug 14, 2026

ScienceFlow: A long-horizon agent for ML research, scientific discovery and beyond

Enabling LLM agents to sustain productive, stable, and goal-aligned research over extended horizons is a central challenge for autonomous machine learning and scientific discovery, as progress hinges on continuously managing evolving state, exploration decisions, and computational resources. Pioneering autoresearch agents, despite great success, still lack mechanisms for continuity, recovery from dead ends, and value-driven compute allocation, which inherently undermines overall search efficiency, wastes computational resources, and lowers the chance of ultimate success. To bridge this gap, we introduce ScienceFlow, an end-to-end autoresearch agent framework that organizes long-horizon research work into research segments grounded in executable workspaces. It represents research progress as recoverable executable states, enabling efficient exploration, revision, and execution. Transitions between research segments are governed by Executable-State Transition through Re-Anchoring (ESTRA), which selects either the live state or an archived state as the next anchor and determines whether to continue or redirect the research trajectory. An evidence-aware execution controller allocates resources to physical jobs based on resource availability, remaining budget, and validated progress. We evaluate ScienceFlow on tasks spanning machine learning, scientific modeling, and mathematical optimization. Results on diverse long-horizon benchmarks demonstrate its ability to sustain effective research processes, highlighted by a SOTA 70.22 percent Any-Medal score on the full MLE-bench within a 24-hour budget, outperforming prior reported results by 4.92 percentage points. The efficacy of ScienceFlow further demonstrates that efficient state management, adaptive exploration, and objective-aligned execution are critical for scaling autonomous research beyond short-horizon interactions.
Oct 1, 2026

YouRA: A Persistent-State Architecture for Evidence-Traceable Autonomous Research Agents

End-to-end research agents can now produce complete scientific papers, yet manuscript claims often diverge from executed experiments. This gap is structural: research state, failure histories, and claim-evidence alignment are not maintained as persistent, verifiable state across long-horizon pipelines. We present YouRA (Your Research Agent), an architecture for stateful, evidence-traceable autonomous research. YouRA preserves research state, execution evidence, and failure history across the research trajectory by integrating three components: a Verification State Architecture (VSA) that tracks hypotheses, gates, and evidence pointers; an Independent Controller that turns state and reflection records into lifecycle, recovery, and debate/review control while separating control from execution; and Stateful Reflection that logs failures as structured lessons and routes recovery through bounded repair, redesign, or reset. On MLR-Bench's predefined ten-task end-to-end subset, YouRA improves over both MLR-Agent and AI Scientist V2 on scalar Overall across all three matched backbones. An automated diagnostic using MLR-Bench's hallucination taxonomy reports intersection/union counts for four fact-based failure types, and data-provenance diagnostic shows more real-data-based outputs. Ablating each of the four components (the VSA, the Independent Controller, MCP tool access, and reflection-guided recovery) supports their separable contributions. Removing either core-state component drops YouRA below the full system. Code: https://github.com/PrayPrey/Your-Research-Agent.
Apr 7, 2026

Deep Researcher Agent: An Autonomous Framework for 24/7 Deep Learning Experimentation with Zero-Cost Monitoring

We present Deep Researcher Agent, an open-source framework that enables large language model (LLM) agents to autonomously conduct deep learning experiments around the clock. Unlike existing AI research assistants that focus on paper writing or code generation, our system addresses the full experiment lifecycle: hypothesis formation, code implementation, training execution, result analysis, and iterative refinement. The framework introduces three key innovations: (1) Zero-Cost Monitoring -- a monitoring paradigm that incurs zero LLM API costs during model training by relying solely on process-level checks and log file reads; (2) Two-Tier Constant-Size Memory -- a memory architecture capped at ∼\sim5K characters regardless of runtime duration, preventing the unbounded context growth that plagues long-running agents; and (3) Minimal-Toolset Leader-Worker Architecture -- a multi-agent design where each worker agent is equipped with only 3--5 tools, reducing per-call token overhead by up to 73%. In sustained deployments spanning 30+ days, the framework autonomously completed 500+ experiment cycles across four concurrent research projects, achieving a 52% improvement over baseline metrics in one project through 200+ automated experiments -- all at an average LLM cost of $0.08 per 24-hour cycle. Code is available at https://github.com/Xiangyue-Zhang/auto-deep-researcher-24x7.