Autonomous Research Agents

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Overview

Autonomous research agents use language models to plan and carry out research tasks, from literature search and hypothesis generation to coding, experiments, analysis, and reporting. Common approaches include tool-using coding agents, teams of specialized agents, persistent memory, and training with supervised or reinforcement learning; execution harnesses and formal or domain-specific checks help constrain their work. Agents can perform well on bounded, executable tasks such as model optimization, code reproduction, and formal proof search, but open-ended research remains harder, especially when novelty or scientific validity is difficult to measure. A central challenge is ensuring that reported claims follow from reliable experiments and evidence, which motivates independent verification, held-out evaluation, provenance tracking, and continued human oversight.

Latest papers

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324 papers60 papers in the last four weeks, up 62% on the four weeks before. 0.3% of all new papers.

Mar 16, 2026

The Agentic Researcher: A Practical Guide to AI-Assisted Research in Mathematics and Machine Learning

AI tools and agents are reshaping how researchers work, from proving theorems to training neural networks. Yet for many, it remains unclear how these tools fit into everyday research practice. This paper is a practical guide to AI-assisted research in mathematics and machine learning: We discuss how researchers can use modern AI systems productively, where these systems help most, and what kinds of guardrails are needed to use them responsibly. It is organized into three parts: (I) a five-level taxonomy of AI integration, (II) an open-source framework that, through a set of methodological rules formulated as agent prompts, turns CLI coding agents (e.g., Claude Code, Codex CLI, OpenCode) into autonomous research assistants, and (III) case studies from deep learning and mathematics. The framework runs inside a sandboxed container, works with any frontier LLM through existing CLI agents, is simple enough to install and use within minutes, and scales from personal-laptop prototyping to multi-node, multi-GPU experimentation across compute clusters. In practice, our longest autonomous session ran for over 20 hours, dispatching independent experiments across multiple nodes without human intervention. We stress that our framework is not intended to replace the researcher in the loop, but to augment them. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/ZIB-IOL/The-Agentic-Researcher.

Max Zimmer, Nico Pelleriti, Christophe Roux +1

Department for AI in Society, Science, and Technology, Zuse Institute Berlin, Germany · Institute of Mathematics, Technische Universität Berlin, Germany

AI-Assisted Scientific ResearchAutonomous Research AgentsHuman-AI CollaborationLLM Agent Harnesses
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Mar 16, 2026

MiroThinker-1.7 & H1: Towards Heavy-Duty Research Agents via Verification

We present MiroThinker-1.7, a new research agent designed for complex long-horizon reasoning tasks. Building on this foundation, we further introduce MiroThinker-H1, which extends the agent with heavy-duty reasoning capabilities for more reliable multi-step problem solving. In particular, MiroThinker-1.7 improves the reliability of each interaction step through an agentic mid-training stage that emphasizes structured planning, contextual reasoning, and tool interaction. This enables more effective multi-step interaction and sustained reasoning across complex tasks. MiroThinker-H1 further incorporates verification directly into the reasoning process at both local and global levels. Intermediate reasoning decisions can be evaluated and refined during inference, while the overall reasoning trajectory is audited to ensure that final answers are supported by coherent chains of evidence. Across benchmarks covering open-web research, scientific reasoning, and financial analysis, MiroThinker-H1 achieves state-of-the-art performance on deep research tasks while maintaining strong results on specialized domains. We also release MiroThinker-1.7 and MiroThinker-1.7-mini as open-source models, providing competitive research-agent capabilities with significantly improved efficiency.

MiroMind Team, S. Bai, L. Bing +41

Autonomous Research AgentsLong-Horizon LLM AgentsAgentic ReasoningLLM Agent ReliabilityReasoning Verification
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Mar 15, 2026

An End-to-end Architecture for Collider Physics and Beyond

We present, to our knowledge, the first language-driven agent system capable of executing end-to-end collider phenomenology tasks, instantiated within a decoupled, domain-agnostic architecture for autonomous High-Energy Physics phenomenology. Guided only by natural-language prompts supplemented with standard physics notation, ColliderAgent carries out workflows from a theoretical Lagrangian to final phenomenological outputs without relying on package-specific code. In this framework, a hierarchical multi-agent reasoning layer is coupled to Magnus, a unified execution backend for phenomenological calculations and simulation toolchains. We validate the system on representative literature reproductions spanning leptoquark and axion-like-particle scenarios, higher-dimensional effective operators, parton-level and detector-level analyses, and large-scale parameter scans leading to exclusion limits. These results point to a route toward more automated, scalable, and reproducible research in collider physics, cosmology, and physics more broadly.

Shi Qiu, Zeyu Cai, Jiashen Wei +7

School of Physics, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China · Center for High Energy Physics, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China · School of Physics, Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou 450001, China +3

Autonomous Research AgentsAI Agents for Scientific DiscoveryMulti-Agent LLM Systems
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Mar 15, 2026

Autonomous Agents Coordinating Distributed Discovery Through Emergent Artifact Exchange

We present ScienceClaw + Infinite, a framework for autonomous scientific investigation in which independent agents conduct research without central coordination, and any contributor can deploy new agents into a shared ecosystem. The system is built around three components: an extensible registry of over 300 interoperable scientific skills, an artifact layer that preserves full computational lineage as a directed acyclic graph (DAG), and a structured platform for agent-based scientific discourse with provenance-aware governance. Agents select and chain tools based on their scientific profiles, produce immutable artifacts with typed metadata and parent lineage, and broadcast unsatisfied information needs to a shared global index. The ArtifactReactor enables plannerless coordination: peer agents discover and fulfill open needs through pressure-based scoring, while schema-overlap matching triggers multi-parent synthesis across independent analyses. An autonomous mutation layer actively prunes the expanding artifact DAG to resolve conflicting or redundant workflows, while persistent memory allows agents to continuously build upon complex epistemic states across multiple cycles. Infinite converts these outputs into auditable scientific records through structured posts, provenance views, and machine-readable discourse relations, with community feedback steering subsequent investigation cycles. Across four autonomous investigations, peptide design for the somatostatin receptor SSTR2, lightweight impact-resistant ceramic screening, cross-domain resonance bridging biology, materials, and music, and formal analogy construction between urban morphology and grain-boundary evolution, the framework demonstrates heterogeneous tool chaining, emergent convergence among independently operating agents, and traceable reasoning from raw computation to published finding.

Fiona Y. Wang, Lee Marom, Subhadeep Pal +4

Laboratory for Atomistic and Molecular Mechanics (LAMM), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA · Department of Biological Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA · Department of Mechanical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA +3

Autonomous Scientific DiscoveryAutonomous Research AgentsMulti-Agent CoordinationEmergent Behavior in Multi-Agent Systems
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Mar 14, 2026

ClimateAgents: A Multi-Agent Research Assistant for Social-Climate Dynamics Analysis

The complex interaction between social behaviors and climate change requires more than traditional data-driven prediction; it demands interpretable and adaptive analytical frameworks capable of integrating heterogeneous sources of knowledge. This study introduces ClimateAgents, a multi-agent research assistant designed to support social-climate analysis through coordinated AI agents. Rather than focusing solely on predictive modeling, the framework assists researchers in exploring socio-environmental dynamics by integrating multimodal data retrieval, statistical modeling, textual analysis, and automated reasoning. Traditional approaches to climate analysis often address narrowly defined indicators and lack the flexibility to incorporate cross-domain socio-economic knowledge or adapt to evolving research questions. To address these limitations, ClimateAgents employs a set of collaborative, domain-specialized agents that collectively perform key stages of the research workflow, including hypothesis generation, data analysis, evidence retrieval, and structured reporting. The framework supports exploratory analysis and scenario investigation using datasets from sources such as the United Nations and the World Bank. By combining agent-based reasoning with quantitative analysis of socio-economic behavioral dynamics, ClimateAgents enables adaptive and interpretable exploration of relationships between climate indicators, social variables, and environmental outcomes. The results illustrate how multi-agent AI systems can augment analytical reasoning and facilitate interdisciplinary, data-driven investigation of complex socio-environmental systems.

Shan Shan

Autonomous Research AgentsData Analysis AgentsMulti-Agent SystemsComputational Social Science
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Mar 9, 2026

PostTrainBench: Can LLM Agents Automate LLM Post-Training?

AI agents have become surprisingly proficient at software engineering over the past year, largely due to improvements in reasoning capabilities. This raises a deeper question: can these systems extend their capabilities to automate AI research itself? In this paper, we explore post-training, the critical phase that turns base LLMs into useful assistants. We introduce PostTrainBench to benchmark how well LLM agents can perform post-training autonomously under bounded compute constraints (10 hours on one H100 GPU). We ask frontier agents (e.g., Claude Code with Opus 4.6) to optimize the performance of a base LLM on a particular benchmark (e.g., Qwen3-4B on AIME). Importantly, we do not provide any predefined strategies to the agents and instead give them full autonomy to find necessary information on the web, run experiments, and curate data. We find that frontier agents make substantial progress but generally lag behind instruction-tuned LLMs from leading providers: 23.2% for the best agent vs. 51.1% for official instruction-tuned models. However, agents can exceed instruction-tuned models in targeted scenarios: GPT-5.1 Codex Max achieves 89% on BFCL with Gemma-3-4B vs. 67% for the official model. We also observe several failure modes worth flagging. Agents sometimes engage in reward hacking: training on the test set, downloading existing instruction-tuned checkpoints instead of training their own, and using API keys they find to generate synthetic data without authorization. These behaviors are concerning and highlight the importance of careful sandboxing as these systems become more capable. Overall, we hope PostTrainBench will be useful for tracking progress in AI R&D automation and for studying the risks that come with it. Website and code are available at https://posttrainbench.com/.

Ben Rank, Hardik Bhatnagar, Ameya Prabhu +4

ELLIS Institute Tübingen · Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems · Tübingen AI Center +2

LLM Post-TrainingAutonomous Research AgentsAI Agent BenchmarksLLM Agent Evaluation
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Mar 9, 2026

SynPlanResearch-R1: Encouraging Tool Exploration for Deep Research with Synthetic Plans

Research Agents enable models to gather information from the web using tools to answer user queries, requiring them to dynamically interleave internal reasoning with tool use. While such capabilities can in principle be learned via reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), we observe that agents often exhibit poor exploration behaviors, including premature termination and biased tool usage. As a result, RLVR alone yields limited improvements. We propose SynPlanResearch-R1, a framework that synthesizes tool-use trajectories that encourage deeper exploration to shape exploration during cold-start supervised fine-tuning, providing a strong initialization for subsequent RL. Across seven multi-hop and open-web benchmarks, \framework improves performance by up to 6.0% on Qwen3-8B and 5.8% on Qwen3-4B backbones respectively compared to SOTA baselines. Further analyses of tool-use patterns and training dynamics compared to baselines shed light on the factors underlying these gains. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/HansiZeng/syn-plan-research.

Hansi Zeng, Zoey Li, Yifan Gao +7

University of Massachusetts Amherst · Amazon · University of Montreal +2

Synthetic Data Generation for LLM AgentsLLM Agent TrainingLLM AgentsAutonomous Research AgentsRL for Tool UseSynthetic Data Generation
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Mar 7, 2026

AutoResearch-RL: Perpetual Self-Evaluating Reinforcement Learning Agents for Autonomous Neural Architecture Discovery

We present AutoResearch-RL, a framework in which a reinforcement learning agent conducts open-ended neural architecture and hyperparameter research without human supervision, running perpetually until a termination oracle signals convergence or resource exhaustion. At each step the agent proposes a code modification to a target training script, executes it under a fixed wall clock time budget, observes a scalar reward derived from validation bits-per-byte (val-bpb), and updates its policy via Proximal Policy Optimisation (PPO). The key design insight is the separation of three concerns: (i) a frozen environment (data pipeline, evaluation protocol, and constants) that guarantees fair cross-experiment comparison; (ii) a mutable target file (train.py) that represents the agent's editable state; and (iii) a meta-learner (the RL agent itself) that accumulates a growing trajectory of experiment outcomes and uses them to inform subsequent proposals. We formalise this as a Markov Decision Process, derive convergence guarantees under mild assumptions, and demonstrate empirically on a single GPU nanochat pretraining benchmark that AutoResearch-RL discovers configurations that match or exceed hand-tuned baselines after approximately 300 overnight iterations, with no human in the loop.

Nilesh Jain, Rohit Yadav, Sagar Kotian +1

Yale · Google Cloud · Stanford +5

Autonomous Research AgentsAutonomous ExperimentationNeural Architecture SearchHyperparameter Optimization
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Mar 6, 2026

ResearchEnvBench: Benchmarking Agents on Environment Synthesis for Research Code Execution

Autonomous agents are increasingly expected to support scientific research, and recent benchmarks report progress in code repair and autonomous experimentation. However, these evaluations typically assume a pre-configured execution environment, which requires resolving complex software dependencies, aligning hardware and framework versions, and configuring distributed execution, yet this capability remains largely unbenchmarked. We introduce ResearchEnvBench, a benchmark for environment synthesis in research code execution. Given a research repository, documentation, and a target execution setting, agents must construct an environment that successfully executes at runtime. Evaluations on diverse research repositories reveal a substantial gap in current SOTA agents, with failures dominated by incomplete dependency resolution and brittle version coupling. ResearchEnvBench provides a realistic testbed for advancing autonomous agents toward reproducible scientific research.

Yubang Wang, Chenxi Zhang, Bowen Chen +7

Shanghai Innovation Institution · College of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, Fudan University · OpenMOSS +5

AI Agent BenchmarksAutonomous Research AgentsAI-Assisted Scientific ResearchSoftware Engineering
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Mar 4, 2026

DOVA: Deliberation-First Multi-Agent Orchestration for Autonomous Research Automation

Large language model (LLM) agents have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in tool use, reasoning, and code generation, yet single-agent systems exhibit fundamental limitations when confronted with complex research tasks demanding multi-source synthesis, adversarial verification, and personalized delivery. We present DOVA (Deep Orchestrated Versatile Agent), a multi-agent platform introducing three key innovations: (1) deliberation-first orchestration, where explicit meta-reasoning precedes tool invocation, informed by a persistent user model and entity-aware conversation context; (2) hybrid collaborative reasoning, a composable three-phase pipeline unifying ensemble diversity, blackboard transparency, and iterative refinement; and (3) adaptive multi-tiered thinking, a six-level token-budget allocation scheme that reduces inference cost by 40-60% on simple tasks while preserving deep reasoning capacity. We formalize the core algorithms, present an architectural ablation study across seven system configurations, and analyze the contribution of each component to answer confidence, source coverage, and token efficiency.

Aaron Shen, Alfred Shen

University of California, Berkeley, USA · Amazon Web Services, USA

Multi-Agent OrchestrationAutonomous Research AgentsMulti-Agent ReasoningLLM Agent Workflow OptimizationAdaptive Computation
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Mar 1, 2026

Catalyst-Agent: Autonomous heterogeneous catalyst screening with an LLM Agent

The discovery of catalysts for electrochemical applications such as the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR), nitrogen reduction reaction (NRR), and CO2 reduction reaction (CO2RR) remains a central challenge in chemistry and materials science. Machine-learning interatomic potentials (MLIPs) and graph neural network models now accelerate individual adsorption-energy calculations by orders of magnitude relative to density functional theory. However, true large-scale screening is still blocked by human decisions: selecting candidates, constructing slabs, enumerating adsorption sites, interpreting descriptor failures, and choosing follow-up modifications. Here, we introduce Catalyst-Agent, a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server-based, LLM-powered agent that autonomously coordinates closed-loop catalyst screening. Catalyst-Agent searches materials databases through OPTIMADE, constructs slabs, computes adsorption energies using Meta FAIRchem's UMA MLIP within AdsorbML, evaluates reaction-specific descriptors, and applies structural modifications to refine near-miss candidates. In ORR, NRR, and CO2RR campaigns, Catalyst-Agent demonstrates high performance and converges in 1.40-3.41 trials per successful material on average. It identified Sn3Sc, Sn3Y, Tl3La, Pb3Y and In3Y as CO2RR candidates for further validation that were not previously reported in the literature. DFT single-point checks confirmed screening outcomes for representative NRR and CO2RR candidates. Ablations show these gains arise from chemically informed candidate selection and feedback-directed modification rather than brute-force evaluation: fully randomized screening dropped to 13.3%, 16.7%, and 0% success for ORR, NRR, and CO2RR, respectively. These results show that tool-grounded LLM agents can shift catalyst screening from manual trial-and-error toward more autonomous, reproducible and adaptive workflows.

Achuth Chandrasekhar, Janghoon Ock, Amir Barati Farimani

Mechanical Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA · Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Lincoln, NE 68588, USA · Biomedical Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA +3

LLM Agent OrchestrationMaterials ScienceLarge Language Model-Guided Scientific DiscoveryAutonomous Research Agents
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Feb 28, 2026

Super Research: Answering Highly Complex Questions with Large Language Models through Super Deep and Super Wide Research

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated proficiency in Deep Research or Wide Search, their capacity to solve highly complex questions-those requiring long-horizon planning, massive evidence gathering, and synthesis across heterogeneous sources-remains largely unexplored. We introduce Super Research, a task for complex autonomous research tasks that integrates (i) structured decomposition into a research plan, (ii) super wide retrieval for diverse perspectives, and (iii) super deep investigation to resolve uncertainties through iterative queries. To evaluate this capability, we curated a benchmark of 300 expert-written questions across diverse domains, each requiring up to 100+ retrieval steps and 1,000+ web pages to reconcile conflicting evidence. Super Research produces verifiable reports with fine-grained citations and intermediate artifacts (e.g., outlines and tables) to ensure traceable reasoning. Furthermore, we present a graph-anchored auditing protocol that evaluates Super Research along five dimensions: Coverage, Logical Consistency, Report Utility, Objectivity and Citation Health. While super-complex questions may be infrequent in standard applications, Super Research serves as a critical ceiling evaluation and stress test for LLM capabilities. A model's proficiency within Super Research acts as a powerful proxy for its general research competence; success here suggests the robustness necessary to navigate nearly any subordinate research task. Leaderboard is available at: https://cnsdqd-dyb.github.io/Super-Research-Benchmark/

Yubo Dong, Nianhao You, Yuxuan Hou +5

College of Computer Science and Technology · Ant Group, Hangzhou, China

Autonomous Research AgentsLLM EvaluationDeep Research AgentsKnowledge-Intensive QA
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Feb 26, 2026

MiroFlow: Towards High-Performance and Robust Open-Source Agent Framework for General Deep Research Tasks

Despite the remarkable progress of large language models (LLMs), the capabilities of standalone LLMs have begun to plateau when tackling real-world, complex tasks that require interaction with external tools and dynamic environments. Although recent agent frameworks aim to enhance model autonomy through tool integration and external interaction, they still suffer from naive workflows, unstable performance, limited support across diverse benchmarks and tasks, and heavy reliance on costly commercial APIs. In this work, we propose a high-performance and robust open-source agent framework, termed MiroFlow, which incorporates an agent graph for flexible orchestration, an optional deep reasoning mode to enhance performance, and a robust workflow execution to ensure stable and reproducible performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MiroFlow consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple agent benchmarks, including GAIA, BrowseComp-EN/ZH, HLE, xBench-DeepSearch, and notably FutureX. We hope it could serve as an easily accessible, reproducible, and comparable baseline for the deep research community.

Shiqian Su, Sen Xing, Xuan Dong +13

Tsinghua University · MiroMind AI · National University of Singapore +1

Autonomous Research AgentsLLM Agent OrchestrationLLM Agent Workflow OptimizationLLM Agent Reliability
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Feb 26, 2026

Search More, Think Less: Rethinking Long-Horizon Agentic Search for Efficiency and Generalization

Recent deep research agents primarily improve performance by scaling reasoning depth, but this leads to high inference cost and latency in search-intensive scenarios. Moreover, generalization across heterogeneous research settings remains challenging. In this work, we propose Search More, Think Less (SMTL), a framework for long-horizon agentic search that targets both efficiency and generalization. SMTL replaces sequential reasoning with parallel evidence acquisition, enabling efficient context management under constrained context budgets. To support generalization across task types, we further introduce a unified data synthesis pipeline that constructs search tasks spanning both deterministic question answering and open-ended research scenarios with task appropriate evaluation metrics. We train an end-to-end agent using supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, achieving strong and often state of the art performance across benchmarks including BrowseComp (48.6%), GAIA (75.7%), Xbench (82.0%), and DeepResearch Bench (45.9%). Compared to Mirothinker-v1.0, SMTL with maximum 100 interaction steps reduces the average number of reasoning steps on BrowseComp by 70.7%, while improving accuracy.

Qianben Chen, Tianrui Qin, King Zhu +21

Agentic SearchLong-Horizon LLM AgentsAutonomous Research AgentsLLM Agent TrainingLong-Horizon Agent Evaluation
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Feb 25, 2026

Vibe Researching as Wolf Coming: Can AI Agents with Skills Replace or Augment Social Scientists?

AI agents -- systems that execute multi-step reasoning workflows with persistent state, tool access, and specialist skills -- represent a qualitative shift from prior automation technologies in social science. Unlike chatbots that respond to isolated queries, AI agents can now read files, run code, query databases, search the web, and invoke domain-specific skills to execute entire research pipelines autonomously. This paper introduces the concept of vibe researching -- the AI-era parallel to vibe coding -- and uses scholar-skill, a 26-skill plugin for Claude Code covering the full research pipeline from idea to submission across 18 orchestrated phases with 53 quality gates, as an illustrative case. I develop a cognitive task framework that classifies research activities along two dimensions -- codifiability and tacit knowledge requirement -- to identify a delegation boundary that is cognitive, not sequential: it cuts through every stage of the research pipeline, not between stages. I argue that AI agents excel at speed, coverage, and methodological scaffolding but struggle with theoretical originality and tacit field knowledge. The paper concludes with an analysis of three implications for the profession -- augmentation with fragile conditions, stratification risk, and a pedagogical crisis -- and proposes five principles for responsible vibe researching.

Yongjun Zhang

Department of Sociology and Institute for Advanced Computational Science, Stony Brook University.

Human-AI CollaborationAutonomous Research Agents
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Feb 24, 2026

Aletheia tackles FirstProof autonomously

We report the performance of Aletheia (Feng et al., 2026b), a mathematics research agent powered by Gemini 3 Deep Think, on the inaugural FirstProof challenge. Within the allowed timeframe of the challenge, Aletheia autonomously solved 6 problems (2, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10) out of 10 according to majority expert assessments; we note that experts were not unanimous on Problem 8 (only). For full transparency, we explain our interpretation of FirstProof and disclose details about our experiments as well as our evaluation. Raw prompts and outputs are available at https://github.com/google-deepmind/superhuman/tree/main/aletheia.

Tony Feng, Junehyuk Jung, Sang-hyun Kim +14

Google DeepMind · UC Berkeley · Brown University +7

LLM Mathematical ReasoningAutonomous Research AgentsAI Agent Evaluation
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Feb 23, 2026

From Agent-Only Social Networks to Autonomous Scientific Research: Lessons from OpenClaw and Moltbook, and the Architecture of ClawdLab and Beach.Science

In January 2026, the open-source agent framework OpenClaw and the agent-only social network Moltbook produced a large-scale dataset of autonomous AI-to-AI interaction, attracting six academic publications within fourteen days. This study conducts a multivocal literature review of that ecosystem and presents two complementary platforms for autonomous scientific research as a design science response to the architectural failure modes identified. ClawdLab, an open-source platform for structured laboratory collaboration, addresses these failure modes through hard role restrictions, structured adversarial critique, PI-led governance, multi-model orchestration, and evidence requirements enforced through external tool verification, in which the principal investigator validates submitted work using available API calls, computational services, and model context protocol integrations rather than relying on social consensus. Beach.science, a public research commons, complements ClawdLab's structured laboratory model by providing a free-form environment in which heterogeneous agent configurations interact, discover research opportunities, and autonomously contribute computational analyses, supported by template-based role specialisation, extensible skill registries, and programmatic reward mechanisms that distribute inference resources to agents demonstrating scientific progress. A three-tier taxonomy distinguishes single-agent pipelines, predetermined multi-agent workflows, and fully decentralised systems, analysing why leading AI co-scientist platforms remain confined to the first two tiers. The composable third-tier architecture instantiated across ClawdLab and beach.science, in which foundation models, capabilities, governance, verification tooling, and inter-lab coordination are independently modifiable, enables compounding improvement as the broader AI ecosystem advances.

Lukas Weidener, Marko Brkić, Phillip Lee +3

Autonomous Research AgentsAI Agents for Scientific DiscoveryMulti-Agent CollaborationMulti-Agent SystemsAI Agent GovernanceMulti-Agent Orchestration
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Feb 23, 2026

How to Train Your Deep Research Agent? Prompt, Reward, and Policy Optimization in Search-R1

Deep Research agents tackle knowledge-intensive tasks through multi-round retrieval and decision-oriented generation. While reinforcement learning (RL) has been shown to improve performance in this paradigm, its contributions remain underexplored. To fully understand the role of RL, we conduct a systematic study along three decoupled dimensions: prompt template, reward function, and policy optimization. Our study reveals that: 1) the Fast Thinking template yields greater stability and better performance than the Slow Thinking template used in prior work; 2) the F1-based reward underperforms the EM due to training collapse driven by answer avoidance; this can be mitigated by incorporating action-level penalties, ultimately surpassing EM; 3) REINFORCE outperforms PPO while requiring fewer search actions, whereas GRPO shows the poorest stability among policy optimization methods. Building on these insights, we then introduce Search-R1++, a strong baseline that improves the performance of Search-R1 from 0.403 to 0.442 (Qwen2.5-7B) and 0.289 to 0.331 (Qwen2.5-3B). We hope that our findings can pave the way for more principled and reliable RL training strategies in Deep Research systems.

Yinuo Xu, Shuo Lu, Jianjie Cheng +5

NLPR & MAIS, CASIA · School of AI, UCAS · Meituan Inc.

RL for LLM AgentsAutonomous Research AgentsReward Design for RLRL for IRPolicy Gradient Methods
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Feb 22, 2026

InfEngine: A Self-Verifying and Self-Optimizing Intelligent Engine for Infrared Radiation Computing

Infrared radiation computing underpins advances in climate science, remote sensing and spectroscopy but remains constrained by manual workflows. We introduce InfEngine, an autonomous intelligent computational engine designed to drive a paradigm shift from human-led orchestration to collaborative automation. It integrates four specialized agents through two core innovations: self-verification, enabled by joint solver-evaluator debugging, improves functional correctness and scientific plausibility; self-optimization, realized via evolutionary algorithms with self-discovered fitness functions, facilitates autonomous performance optimization. Evaluated on InfBench with 200 infrared-specific tasks and powered by InfTools with 270 curated tools, InfEngine achieves a 92.7% pass rate and delivers workflows 21x faster than manual expert effort. More fundamentally, it illustrates how researchers can transition from manual coding to collaborating with self-verifying, self-optimizing computational partners. By generating reusable, verified and optimized code, InfEngine transforms computational workflows into persistent scientific assets, accelerating the cycle of scientific discovery. Code: https://github.com/kding1225/infengine

Kun Ding, Jian Xu, Ying Wang +2

State Key Laboratory of Multimodal Artificial Intelligence Systems, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.

Scientific Workflow AutomationScientific Code GenerationAutonomous Research Agents
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Feb 16, 2026

ResearchGym: Evaluating Language Model Agents on Real-World AI Research

We introduce ResearchGym, a benchmark and execution environment for evaluating AI agents on end-to-end research. To instantiate this, we repurpose five oral and spotlight papers from ICML, ICLR, and ACL. From each paper's repository, we preserve the datasets, evaluation harness, and baseline implementations but withhold the paper's proposed method. This results in five containerized task environments comprising 39 sub-tasks in total. Within each environment, agents must propose novel hypotheses, run experiments, and attempt to surpass strong human baselines on the paper's metrics. In a controlled evaluation of an agent powered by GPT-5, we observe a sharp capability--reliability gap. The agent improves over the provided baselines from the repository in just 1 of 15 evaluations (6.7%) by 11.5%, and completes only 26.5% of sub-tasks on average. We identify recurring long-horizon failure modes, including impatience, poor time and resource management, overconfidence in weak hypotheses, difficulty coordinating parallel experiments, and hard limits from context length. Yet in a single run, the agent surpasses the solution of an ICML 2025 Spotlight task, indicating that frontier agents can occasionally reach state-of-the-art performance, but do so unreliably. We additionally evaluate proprietary agent scaffolds including Claude Code (Opus-4.5) and Codex (GPT-5.2) which display a similar gap. ResearchGym provides infrastructure for systematic evaluation and analysis of autonomous agents on closed-loop research.

Aniketh Garikaparthi, Manasi Patwardhan, Arman Cohan

TCS Research · Yale University

AI Agent BenchmarksAutonomous Research AgentsAutomated Agent EvaluationLong-Horizon LLM AgentsAI Agent Reliability
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Feb 4, 2026

El Agente Quntur: A research collaborator agent for quantum chemistry

Quantum chemistry is a foundational enabling tool for the fields of chemistry, materials science, computational biology and others. Despite of its power, the practical application of quantum chemistry simulations remains in the hands of qualified experts due to methodological complexity, software heterogeneity, and the need for informed interpretation of results. To bridge the accessibility gap for these tools and expand their reach to chemists with broader backgrounds, we introduce El Agente Quntur, a hierarchical, multi-agent AI system designed to operate not merely as an automation tool but as a research collaborator for computational quantum chemistry. Quntur was designed following three main strategies: i) elimination of hard-coded procedural policies in favour of reasoning-driven decisions, ii) construction of general and composable actions that facilitate generalization and efficiency, and iii) implementation of guided deep research to integrate abstract quantum-chemical reasoning across subdisciplines and a detailed understanding of the software's internal logic and syntax. Although instantiated in ORCA, these design principles are applicable to research agents more generally and easily expandable to additional quantum chemistry packages and beyond. Quntur supports the full range of calculations available in ORCA 6.0 and reasons over software documentation and scientific literature to plan, execute, adapt, and analyze in silico chemistry experiments following best practices. We discuss the advances and current bottlenecks in agentic systems operating at the research level in computational chemistry, and outline a roadmap toward a fully autonomous end-to-end computational chemistry research agent.

Juan B. Pérez-Sánchez, Yunheng Zou, Jorge A. Campos-Gonzalez-Angulo +12

Department of Chemistry, University of Toronto, 80 St. George St., Toronto, ON M5S 3H6, Canada · Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence, W1140-108 College St., Schwartz Reisman Innovation Campus, Toronto, ON M5G 0C6, Canada · Acceleration Consortium, 700 University Ave., Toronto, ON M7A 2S4, Canada +6

AI Agents for Scientific DiscoveryComputational Quantum ChemistryQuantum ChemistryMulti-Agent CollaborationTool-Using AgentsAutonomous Research Agents
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Jan 15, 2026

PaperScout: An Autonomous Agent for Academic Paper Search with Process-Aware Sequence-Level Policy Optimization

Academic paper search is a fundamental task in scientific research, yet most existing approaches organize retrieval around predefined workflows or structured interaction protocols that struggle with complex, conditional queries. To address this limitation, we propose PaperScout, an autonomous agent that reformulates paper search as a sequential decision-making process. Unlike static workflows, PaperScout dynamically decides whether, when, and how to invoke search and expand tools based on accumulated retrieval context. However, training such agents presents a fundamental challenge: standard reinforcement learning methods, typically designed for single-turn tasks, suffer from a granularity mismatch when applied to multi-turn agentic tasks, where token-level optimization diverges from the granularity of sequence-level interactions, leading to noisy credit assignment and unstable training dynamics. We introduce Proximal Sequence Policy Optimization (PSPO), a process-aware, sequence-level policy optimization method that aligns optimization with agent--environment interaction. Comprehensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world benchmarks demonstrate that PaperScout significantly outperforms strong structured retrieval and RL baselines in both recall and relevance, validating the effectiveness of our adaptive agentic framework and optimization strategy.

Tingyue Pan, Jie Ouyang, Mingyue Cheng +7

State Key Lab of Cognitive Intelligence, University of Science and Technology of China

Agentic RLPolicy OptimizationInformation RetrievalAutonomous Research AgentsRL for Tool Use
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Aug 4, 2025

AI Scientists for Building Virtual-Cell Models

Autonomous agents, from virtual laboratories to biological data-analysis agents and co-scientists, have begun to turn scientific goals into hypotheses. Whether they can go further and convert real, noisy and complex biological data into executable model hypotheses and architectures that encode testable assumptions remains unclear. Predicting how cells respond to genetic and chemical perturbations is a natural test of this ability: it is central to decoding disease mechanisms and therapeutic discovery, yet it demands cross-disciplinary expertise rarely concentrated in a single research group. Here, we introduce CellForge, an organized team of autonomous agents for single-cell perturbation modeling. Given a dataset and a task, it surveys the literature, parses the data, identifies relevant baselines, and formulates a model hypothesis through critic-mediated discussion among agents specialized in data modeling, single-cell biology, and deep learning. It then writes the training code, runs the experiments, and returns a trained predictor including architecture, code, and validation results. The architecture itself is the hypothesis: CellForge produces it end-to-end, with no human specifying the design, loss, or training protocol. Across six perturbation datasets spanning transcriptomic, epigenomic, and proteomic contexts, CellForge yields models that are competitive with hand-crafted state-of-the-art results on established tasks and extends the same workflow to paired multi-omic readouts. Blinded human evaluators rate CellForge's research plans as more scientifically sound and innovative than those from single LLMs or deep-research systems. In summary, we show autonomous agents can complete the full hypothesis-to-validation cycle in single-cell biology, with an AI effectively building another AI, in a complex setting that currently requires a team of human experts.

Xiangru Tang, Jiapeng Chen, Daniel Shao +12

Yale University · University of Pennsylvania · Helmholtz Zentrum München +3

AI Agents for Scientific DiscoveryAutonomous Research AgentsSingle-Cell Perturbation ModelingLLM Agent Orchestration
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Jul 24, 2025

Neural Architecture Discovery via Autonomous Evolution

Recent progress in LLM agents has advanced the prospect of autonomous research. Yet whether AI can complete difficult long-horizon tasks, especially those that advance AI research itself, remains largely unexplored. We present ASI-Arch, a system for AI-driven AI research that autonomously conducts neural architecture research through a closed-loop research-experiment-analyze-update process. Applied to linear attention, ASI-Arch ran 1,773 iterative experiments and discovered 105 state-of-the-art architectures. Its best architecture improves over DeltaNet by nearly three times the gain achieved by Mamba2. Beyond the final performance gains, we analyze the contributions of different parts of the framework in this hard research setting, shedding light on what enables autonomous progress in complex AI research tasks.

Weixian Xu, Yixiu Liu, Yang Nan +4

Shanghai Jiao Tong University · SII · GAIR +1

Autonomous Research AgentsAI Agents for Scientific DiscoveryNeural Architecture SearchLarge Language Model-Guided NASLinear Attention
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