Automating ML for Science: Can Frontier Agents Climb Scientific Hills in the Wild?

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/.

Frontier scientific reasoning is rapidly emerging as a key foundation for advancing AI agents in automated scientific discovery. Deep research agents offer a promising approach to this challenge. These models develop robust problem-solving capabilities through post-training on information-seeking tasks, which are typically curated via knowledge graph construction or iterative web browsing. However, these strategies face inherent limitations in frontier science, where domain-specific knowledge is scattered across sparse and heterogeneous academic sources, and problem solving requires sophisticated computation and reasoning far beyond factual recall. To bridge this gap, we introduce SciResearcher, a fully automated agentic framework for frontier-science data construction. SciResearcher synthesizes diverse conceptual and computational tasks grounded in academic evidence, while eliciting information acquisition, tool-integrated reasoning, and long-horizon capabilities. Leveraging the curated data for supervised fine-tuning and agentic reinforcement learning, we develop SciResearcher-8B, an agent foundation model that achieves 19.46% on the HLE-Bio/Chem-Gold benchmark, establishing a new state of the art at its parameter scale and surpassing several larger proprietary agents. It further achieves 13-15% absolute gains on SuperGPQA-Hard-Biology and TRQA-Literature benchmarks. Overall, SciResearcher introduces a new paradigm for automated data construction for frontier scientific reasoning and offers a scalable path toward future scientific agents.

AI agents for autonomous scientific discovery must decide which experiments to run under a limited budget. Most benchmarks for science agents provide fixed datasets, while others that support active experimentation largely rely on simulation. We introduce Autonomous Science Bench, an initial release comprising six budgeted design-build-test-learn campaigns grounded in published experiments across biology, chemistry, and materials science. Agents select batches of designs, receive measurements from a lab service, and use the results to guide subsequent experiments before delivering a predictive model. Success requires passing two calibrated gates: a discovery gate, which evaluates the designs the agent measured, and a learning gate, which evaluates its model's ranking of held-out designs. In a pilot evaluation of eight agent-model configurations and 144 trials, the best configuration succeeds in 67% of trials, while the hardest campaign is solved in only three of 24 attempts. The two gates reveal different weaknesses: some agents build accurate rankings but find too few promising designs, while others find promising designs but fail to predict which unseen designs will perform well. These differences are obscured by overall success rates alone. We release version 0.1 of the campaigns, lab runtime, and public leaderboard at https://yibow.me/autonomous-science-bench.