From Prose to Properties: Testing Research Claims with ARATest for Agent-Native Science

As autonomous AI agents take on every stage of scientific inquiry, research output is expanding far beyond human review capacity. Yet scientific communication still relies on natural-language prose: an informal medium prone to ambiguity, hidden assumptions, and untracked limitations that machines cannot reliably audit. We introduce Lara, a machine-checkable language and protocol for checking and revising support for research claims. By turning research arguments into executable artifacts, Lara provides an epistemic kernel for autonomous science: it enables automated validation pipelines for research agents, lets declared bridges connect arguments across papers into an auditable network, and allows both humans and machines to recheck the standing of an encoded claim in milliseconds. In a Lara program, authors explicitly declare their claims, supporting evidence and assumptions, and known objections or limitations. A lightweight, deterministic checker adjudicates these interactions, assigning each claim a reproducible status: "justified", "defeated", "contested", or "gap", which marks a claim whose support is incomplete and locates the unanswered question. Case studies cover empirical review, a philosophical debate without measurements, and the loss of support when an assumed axiom is withdrawn. We establish the metatheory of claim checking and cross-context argument transport, and mechanize the semantic guarantees in Lean 4 (roughly 117,000 lines), leaving three arguments on paper. The audited public metatheory is "sorry"-free and uses only Lean's three standard axioms; some executable examples additionally trust native evaluation.

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.

Large language model agents are increasingly capable of conducting research autonomously, producing research documents alongside the code and experiments that ostensibly support them. Yet whether the reported findings are consistently supported by corresponding implementations and execution evidence remains largely unexplored: existing review practices primarily assess textual quality and cannot reliably identify inconsistencies such as hard-coded metrics, unimplemented methods, or unsupported experimental results. We present ReAgent, an automated auditing framework for assessing the consistency between agent-generated research documents and their associated repositories. ReAgent constructs structured representations of scientific claims from research documents and uses them to guide repository analysis and evidence collection. Static auditing examines whether claimed methodologies, implementations, and experimental configurations are consistently reflected in the repository, while dynamic auditing executes relevant experiments and collects execution evidence to assess empirical findings. By combining static analysis with dynamic evidence, ReAgent identifies inconsistencies that may remain hidden under either perspective alone, such as experiments that reproduce reported numbers while deviating from the claimed methodology. The collected evidence and audit decisions are organized into a structured repository-level audit report, enabling transparent evidence traceability. We evaluate ReAgent on a manually curated benchmark of agent-generated research document--repository pairs and compare it against representative static and reproduction-based baselines. Experimental results demonstrate that ReAgent effectively identifies inconsistencies between reported research findings and their supporting repository evidence.