ScienceClaw: Benchmarking Continual Self-Evolution of AI-for-Science Agents Across the Natural and Social Sciences

AI coding agents are increasingly used for scientific work, but their end-to-end autonomous research capability remains difficult to verify. We present ResearchClawBench, a benchmark for evaluating autonomous scientific research across 40 tasks from 10 scientific domains. Each task is grounded in a real published paper, provides related literature and raw data, and hides the target paper during evaluation. Expert-curated multimodal rubrics decompose the target scientific artifacts into weighted criteria, enabling evaluation of target-paper-level re-discovery while leaving room for new discovery. We evaluate seven autonomous research (auto-research) agents under a unified protocol and seventeen native LLMs through the lightweight ResearchHarness. Current systems remain far from reliable re-discovery: the strongest autonomous agent, Claude Code, averages 21.5, and the strongest ResearchHarness LLM, Claude-Opus-4.7, averages 20.7, with an LLM frontier mean of only 26.5. Error analysis shows that failures concentrate in experimental protocol mismatch, evidence mismatch, and missing scientific core. ResearchClawBench provides a reproducible evaluation frontier for measuring progress toward autonomous scientific research.

The convergence of large language models and agents is catalyzing a new era of scientific discovery: Agentic Science. However, common agent infrastructure is repeatedly rebuilt across scientific fields (loop fragmentation) and useful evidence and experience are lost in long-horizon research (loop discontinuity), bringing obstacles to Agentic Science at Scale. We introduce EvoMaster, a foundational evolving agent framework for Agentic Science at Scale. EvoMaster handles loop fragmentation and loop discontinuity by implementing Loop Research in which external evidence persists and improves later decisions. Through three nested loops, Execution, Exploration and Evolution (E$^3$), loop research connects research within runs, across experiments and across studies. Across ten benchmarks spanning scientific research, coding and reasoning, EvoMaster achieves the best score among four agents using GPT-5.4, reaching a mean score of 58.02%, and outperforms the strongest competing agent Codex(40.29%) while costing 35.6% less. These results show that a shared loop-research foundation can support diverse scientific agents at scale.

AI agents are increasingly being developed to accelerate scientific discovery, yet their practical capabilities in real research settings remain poorly understood. Existing benchmarks for AI agents rarely capture the complexity, heterogeneity, and extended reasoning required by scientific work, whereas benchmarks for scientific tasks often reduce research to static, direct problems and provide limited support for interactive evaluation. Here, we introduce SciAgentArena, a systematic benchmark for evaluating AI agents in real-world scientific research scenarios drawn from emerging needs across multiple domains. SciAgentArena comprises approximately 200 tasks with stepwise verification and an interactive, agent-agnostic environment for assessing diverse AI agents. Using this benchmark, we find that current agents can contribute effectively to well-specified data-analysis workflows, particularly when the task structure and evaluation criteria are clear. However, their performance remains uneven across scientific contexts: agents struggle to generate genuinely novel insights, sustain self-directed exploration, and formulate robust solutions for open-ended research questions. We further characterize common failure modes across agents and identify opportunities for improving their reliability, autonomy, and scientific reasoning. Together, SciAgentArena provides a practical framework for measuring progress in AI agents for science and for guiding the design of future agents capable of addressing complex scientific challenges. Full codes, tasks, and datasets can be accessed via this link: https://sciagentarena.github.io/.