Autonomous Scientific Discovery

Overview

The field studies how AI can move beyond answering questions to uncovering patterns, mechanisms, equations, and useful experiments across mathematics, physics, biology, and materials science. Approaches include symbolic regression and sparse equation identification, active learning and Bayesian experiment selection, and LLM-based agents that coordinate coding, simulation, literature review, or laboratory work. Evaluation increasingly uses executable benchmarks, held-out data, formal proofs, and experimental validation to check both results and the evidence behind them. Systems can handle well-specified workflows, but open-ended insight, reliable mechanism claims, identifiability, and reproducibility remain difficult, motivating stronger verification and human oversight.

Latest papers

CardsList

128 papers22 papers in the last four weeks, up 47% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. Autonomous Research for Open-Ended Problems: A Case Study on Telecom Ticket Retrieval

    Sep 11, 2026Junghyun Min, Huseyin Uzunalioglu, Mohamed TrabelsiHuman-in-the-Loop AIAutonomous Scientific Discovery

  2. Autonomous Chemical Mechanistic Discovery through Agentic Reasoning and Validation

    Sep 10, 2026Dong Li, Sixuan Mi, Zihao Ye +10Agentic ReasoningAutonomous Scientific Discovery

  3. SAEScientist-Bench: Can AI Agents Conduct Autonomous SAE Interpretability Research?

    Sep 8, 2026Yuqiao Tan, Shizhu He, Jun Zhao +1AI Agent EvaluationSparse Autoencoders

  4. AutoKD: Autonomous Knowledge Discovery

    Sep 6, 2026Qinwen Ge, Bo Ni, Haowei Fu +3AI Agents for Scientific DiscoveryAutonomous Scientific Discovery

  5. A computable representation of the physical laboratory enables verifiable workflows

    Sep 3, 2026Xiaobo Li, Luyao Ge, Xiaohui Li +8Agentic WorkflowsRobotics

  6. Learning to Evaluate Before Improving: Automatic Rubric Induction for Automatic Research Agents

    Aug 31, 2026Xuehai Wang, Haowei Qin, Tongxin Liu +6Automatic Rubric GenerationAI Agent Evaluation

  7. Accelerating Scientific Research with Gemini in the Real-World

    Aug 27, 2026Samuel Schmidgall, Xiaokai Zhu, Marian Shaw +32AI for ScienceAutonomous Scientific Discovery

  8. HypoForge: A Self-Improving Multi-Agent Framework for Automated Hypothesis Generation and Testing via Scientific Skill Learning

    Aug 26, 2026Ziqing Qian, Jiaying Lei, Yifang Wang +1Scientific Hypothesis GenerationAutonomous Scientific Discovery

  9. Autonomous Mathematical Discovery in an Open-World Multi-Agent Environment

    Aug 24, 2026Stephen Chung, Wenyu Du, William J. WesleyMulti-Agent CollaborationMulti-Agent Systems

  10. AutoSR: Automatic Symbolic Regression by Searching Research States

    Aug 17, 2026Kejia Zhang, Youran Sun, Xinyu Ren +2Symbolic RegressionAutonomous Scientific Discovery

  11. The Past and Future of AI Scientists

    Aug 14, 2026Ross D. KingAutonomous Scientific DiscoveryAutonomous Experimentation

  12. OmniScientist: An Omni-Modal Omni-Discipline AI Scientist

    Aug 13, 2026Bobo Li, Hao Fei, Tianjie Ju +2AI Agents for Scientific DiscoveryScientific Discovery

  13. POMDPs for Autonomous Science Exploration

    Aug 4, 2026Daniel Guirguis, Nathan Wallace, Hanna Kurniawati +1Belief-Space PlanningAI for Science

  14. Towards a new paradigm of scientific discovery with socialized artificial intelligence

    Aug 3, 2026Xinjie Yao, Xingxin Xu, Xiyuan Gao +21AI for ScienceHuman-in-the-Loop AI

  15. Verifier-Guided Model Discovery for Physical Dynamical Systems with Pretrained Symbolic Transformers

    Aug 1, 2026Farbod Faraji, Francesco BelardinelliNonlinear System IdentificationAutonomous Scientific Discovery

  16. SeekBrain: An Autonomous Multi-Agent System for Accelerating Neuroscience Discovery

    Jul 31, 2026Jiamin Wu, Peishan Xiang, Jingyang Chen +26Autonomous Scientific DiscoveryMultimodal Agents

  17. Can AI Follow In Einstein's Footsteps?

    Jul 30, 2026Michael Shalyt, Nathan Regev, Marin Soljačić +1AI for ScienceScientific Hypothesis Generation

  18. ReasFlow: Assisting Reasoning-Centric Scientific Discovery in Applied Mathematics via a Knowledge-Based Multi-Agent System

    Jul 15, 2026Yutong He, Daibo Li, Guohong Li +15Multi-Agent LLM SystemsAI Agents for Scientific Discovery

  19. Automatic Ordinary Differential Equations Discovery For Biological Systems Using Large Language Model Powered Agentic System

    Jul 15, 2026David Krongauz, Arad Zulti, Eran Segal +1Dynamical SystemsAI Agents for Scientific Discovery

  20. From Observation to Insight: Mechanistic World Models and the Quest for Autonomous Discovery

    Jul 14, 2026Ingmar Posner, Anson Lei, Bernhard SchölkopfAI for ScienceWorld Models

  21. An Agentic AI Scientific Community for Automated Neural Operator Discovery

    Jul 13, 2026Luis Loo, Ulisses Braga-NetoAI Agents for Scientific DiscoveryLLM Agent Orchestration

  22. Toward Trustworthy Autonomous Science: A Two-Year Community Roadmap

    Jul 13, 2026Rafael Ferreira da Silva, Milad Abolhasani, Peter Beaucage +25Autonomous Scientific DiscoveryAI Agent Governance