Autonomous Science Bench: Evaluating AI Agents for Autonomous Scientific Discovery

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/.

As agents rapidly evolve, existing benchmarks can become saturated, limiting their ability to distinguish capabilities and reveal remaining failure modes. Particularly in scientific domains, constructing and updating benchmarks requires substantial time, labor, and domain expertise, making it difficult to keep evaluation aligned with advances in agent capabilities. We address this challenge by investigating whether scientific-agent benchmarks can be automatically generated and iteratively adapted as agent capabilities evolve. We introduce AutoSciBench, a framework that represents each task as a high-level concept specifying the scientific domain, data modality, and required reasoning approach, together with a low-level recipe specifying how the question, environment, and ground-truth answer are constructed and verified. Agents attempt to solve each task, producing solver trajectories and corresponding judge feedback which AutoSciBench uses to revise the recipe or concept, closing observed shortcuts and shifting tasks toward raw-data re-examination, interpretation of intermediate results, and evidence integration. Experience distilled from completed refinement trajectories further guides new concept generation, allowing lessons from earlier task refinement to inform subsequent benchmark construction. Starting from existing benchmarks, we evaluate AutoSciBench across computational biology, materials science, and clinical imaging. Generated benchmarks reduce average solver accuracy by 22.4 and 25.5 percentage points relative to the human-curated benchmarks in computational biology and materials science, respectively, while generated tasks receive higher average quality ratings across all three domains, suggesting that scientific-agent evaluation can adapt as agent capabilities advance.

When Isaac Newton discovered the law of gravitation, he did so through an iterative process of analyzing observed data such as planetary patterns, finding the underlying mechanisms by describing patterns in mathematical equations, and refining his theory against the Moon's orbit, revealing the startling insight that the same force governs both falling apples and orbiting planets. Would it be possible for AI agents to make similar discoveries? To measure this ability, we introduce EurekaBench, a cross-domain benchmark that tests AI agents' ability to conduct long-horizon experiments and discover mechanisms that explain observations. We evaluate these mechanisms by the scientific insights that can be derived from them. EurekaBench contains an expert-verified set of 26 long-horizon tasks across neuroscience, computer science, chemistry, astrophysics, geophysics, and plasma physics, with a total of 306 scientific insights that the discovered mechanisms are expected to support. Our evaluation framework tests three axes of scientific discovery: agents' ability to follow known scientific constraints, the predictive accuracy of the discovered mechanisms, and whether these mechanisms yield scientific insights or inform future research. Our results show that current AI agents often overly fixate on predictive accuracy optimization, surpassing human scientists, while falling substantially short in deriving scientific insights.