Overview

Data analysis agents combine language-model planning with tools such as Python, SQL, statistical packages, APIs, and visualization software to investigate data and explain results. Common approaches include code-generating agents, specialized multi-agent workflows, and systems grounded in schemas, ontologies, or domain-specific skills. Work spans business intelligence, spreadsheets, scientific research, and clinical or financial analysis, with growing emphasis on sandboxed execution, verification, provenance, and human oversight. Agents can handle bounded tasks, but ambiguity, long-running state, cross-source evidence, and silent methodological errors remain major challenges, as do evaluations that measure trustworthy end-to-end results rather than plausible outputs alone.

Latest papers

106 papers24 papers in the last four weeks, up 26% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

Mar 12, 2026

Generating Expressive and Customizable Evals for Timeseries Data Analysis Agents with AgentFuel

Across many domains (e.g., IoT, observability, telecommunications, cybersecurity), there is an emerging adoption of conversational data analysis agents that enable users to "talk to your data" to extract insights. Such data analysis agents operate on timeseries data models; e.g., measurements from sensors or events monitoring user clicks and actions in product analytics. We evaluate 6 popular data analysis agents (both open-source and proprietary) on domain-specific data and query types, and find that they fail on stateful and incident-specific queries. We observe two key expressivity gaps in existing evals: domain-customized datasets and domain-specific query types. To enable practitioners in such domains to generate customized and expressive evals for such timeseries data agents, we present AgentFuel. AgentFuel helps domain experts quickly create customized evals to perform end-to-end functional tests. We show that AgentFuel's benchmarks expose key directions for improvement in existing data agent frameworks. We also present anecdotal evidence that using AgentFuel can improve agent performance (e.g., with GEPA). AgentFuel benchmarks are available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/RockfishData/TimeSeriesAgentEvals.
Mar 10, 2026

Agentic Control Center for Data Product Optimization

Data products enable end users to gain greater insights about their data by providing supporting assets, such as example question-SQL pairs which can be answered using the data or views over the database tables. However, producing useful data products is challenging, and typically requires domain experts to hand-craft supporting assets. We propose a system that automates data product improvement through specialized AI agents operating in a continuous optimization loop. By surfacing questions, monitoring multi-dimensional quality metrics, and supporting human-in-the-loop controls, it transforms data into observable and refinable assets that balance automation with trust and oversight.
Mar 5, 2026

Agentic AI -- Physicist Collaboration in Experimental Particle Physics: A Proof-of-Concept Measurement with LEP Open Data

We present an agentic measurement of the thrust distribution in e+e−e^{+}e^{-} collisions at s=91.2\sqrt{s}=91.2 GeV using ALEPH archived data. This work was carried out through an AI agent-physicist collaboration, using interactive natural-language prompting of Anthropic Claude and OpenAI Codex. Under physicist guidance, the agents wrote and executed all analysis code and drafted the majority of the text included in this paper. A fully-corrected thrust spectrum is obtained via Iterative Bayesian Unfolding and Monte Carlo based corrections. The principal contribution of this work is the demonstration of the agentic analysis, with thrust serving as a benchmark observable for the method. Dedicated precision measurements of thrust are reported in the community elsewhere. This work represents a step toward a theory-experiment loop in which AI agents assist with experimental measurements and theoretical calculations, and synthesize insights by comparing the results, thereby accelerating the cycle that drives discovery in fundamental physics. Our work suggests that precision physics, leveraging the open LEP data and advanced theoretical landscape, provides an ideal testing ground for developing AI agent systems for scientific applications.
Mar 5, 2026

DARE: Aligning LLM Agents with the R Statistical Ecosystem via Distribution-Aware Retrieval

Large Language Model (LLM) agents can automate data-science workflows, but many rigorous statistical methods implemented in R remain underused because LLMs struggle with statistical knowledge and tool retrieval. Existing retrieval-augmented approaches focus on function-level semantics and ignore data distribution, producing suboptimal matches. We propose DARE (Distribution-Aware Retrieval Embedding), a lightweight, plug-and-play retrieval model that incorporates data distribution information into function representations for R package retrieval. Our main contributions are: (i) RPKB, a curated R Package Knowledge Base derived from 8,191 high-quality CRAN packages; (ii) DARE, an embedding model that fuses distributional features with function metadata to improve retrieval relevance; and (iii) RCodingAgent, an R-oriented LLM agent for reliable R code generation and a suite of statistical analysis tasks for systematically evaluating LLM agents in realistic analytical scenarios. Empirically, DARE achieves an NDCG at 10 of 93.47%, outperforming state-of-the-art open-source embedding models by up to 17% on package retrieval while using substantially fewer parameters. Integrating DARE into RCodingAgent yields significant gains on downstream analysis tasks. This work helps narrow the gap between LLM automation and the mature R statistical ecosystem.
Mar 4, 2026

Towards automated data analysis: A guided framework for LLM-based risk estimation

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into critical decision-making pipelines, a trend that raises the demand for robust and automated data analysis. Current approaches to dataset risk analysis are limited to manual auditing methods which involve time-consuming and complex tasks, whereas fully automated analysis based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) suffers from hallucinations and issues stemming from AI alignment. To this end, this work proposes a framework for dataset risk estimation that integrates Generative AI under human guidance and supervision, aiming to set the foundations for a future automated risk analysis paradigm. Our approach utilizes LLMs to identify semantic and structural properties in database schemata, subsequently propose clustering techniques, generate the code for them and finally interpret the produced results. The human supervisor guides the model on the desired analysis and ensures process integrity and alignment with the task's objectives. A proof of concept is presented to demonstrate the feasibility of the framework's utility in producing meaningful results in risk assessment tasks.
Mar 2, 2026

Explainable Iterative Data Visualisation Refinement via an LLM Agent

Exploratory analysis of high-dimensional data relies on embedding the data into a low-dimensional space (typically 2D or 3D), based on which visualization plot is produced to uncover meaningful structures and to communicate geometric and distributional data characteristics. However, finding a suitable algorithm configuration, particularly hyperparameter setting, to produce a visualization plot that faithfully represents the underlying reality and encourages pattern discovery remains challenging. To address this challenge, we propose an agentic AI pipleline that leverages a large language model (LLM) to bridge the gap between rigorous quantitative assessment and qualitative human insight. By treating visualization evaluation and hyperparameter optimization as a semantic task, our system generates a multi-faceted report that contextualizes hard metrics with descriptive summaries, and suggests actionable recommendation of algorithm configuration for refining data visualization. By implementing an iterative optimization loop of this process, the system is able to produce rapidly a high-quality visualization plot, in full automation.
Mar 2, 2026

SciDER: Scientific Data-centric End-to-end Researcher

While large language models accelerate scientific discovery, existing agents face severe limitations in adaptability, domain generalization, and multimodal scalability, often struggling to autonomously process raw, domain-specific experimental data. To overcome these barriers, we introduce SciDER, a multi-agent system designed to flexibly automate the entire research lifecycle. This framework employs a novel data-centric approach and integrates a dynamic multimodal skill system across four specialized sub-agents. Specifically, an ideation agent generates novel hypotheses via Evolutionary Idea Search, a data analysis agent systematically structures raw data, an experimentation agent synthesizes executable code grounded in dataset characteristics, and a critic agent drives iterative self-refinement. To democratize open-source scientific discovery, we release OpenSciDER-SFT-8K, a high-quality execution trajectory dataset, alongside the OpenSciDER-27B fine-tuned model. Across six benchmarks, SciDER and OpenSciDER obtain competitive or leading results, with especially strong gains on data-centric analysis, end-to-end research execution, and multimodal scientific visualization. By integrating data analysis with experimental execution, SciDER bridges the gap between abstract scientific reasoning and reproducible experimentation synthesis.
Feb 24, 2026

A Hierarchical Multi-Agent System for Autonomous Discovery in Geoscientific Data Archives

The rapid accumulation of Earth science data has created a significant scalability challenge; while repositories like PANGAEA host vast collections of datasets, citation metrics indicate that a substantial portion remains underutilized, limiting data reusability. Here we present PANGAEA-GPT, a hierarchical multi-agent framework designed for autonomous data discovery and analysis. Unlike standard Large Language Model (LLM) wrappers, our architecture implements a centralized Supervisor-Worker topology with strict data-type-aware routing, sandboxed deterministic code execution, and self-correction via execution feedback, enabling agents to diagnose and resolve runtime errors. Through use-case scenarios spanning physical oceanography and ecology, we demonstrate the system's capacity to execute complex, multi-step workflows with minimal human intervention. This framework provides a methodology for querying and analyzing heterogeneous repository data through coordinated agent workflows.
Feb 21, 2026

Beyond Description: A Multimodal Agent Framework for Insightful Chart Summarization

Chart summarization is crucial for enhancing data accessibility and the efficient consumption of information. However, existing methods, including those with Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), primarily focus on low-level data descriptions and often fail to capture the deeper insights which are the fundamental purpose of data visualization. To address this challenge, we propose Chart Insight Agent Flow, a plan-and-execute multi-agent framework effectively leveraging the perceptual and reasoning capabilities of MLLMs to uncover profound insights directly from chart images. Furthermore, to overcome the lack of suitable benchmarks, we introduce ChartSummInsights, a new dataset featuring a diverse collection of real-world charts paired with high-quality, insightful summaries authored by human data analysis experts. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly improves the performance of MLLMs on the chart summarization task, producing summaries with deep and diverse insights.
Feb 21, 2026

Many AI Analysts, One Dataset: Navigating the Agentic Data Science Multiverse

Empirical conclusions depend not only on data but on analytic decisions made throughout the research process. Many-analyst studies have quantified this dependence: independent teams testing the same hypothesis on the same dataset regularly reach conflicting conclusions. But such studies require costly human coordination and are rarely conducted. We show that fully autonomous AI analysts built on large language models (LLMs) can, cheaply and at scale, replicate the structured analytic diversity observed in human multi-analyst studies. In our framework, each AI analyst independently executes a complete analysis pipeline on a fixed dataset and hypothesis; a separate AI auditor screens every run for methodological validity. Across three datasets spanning distinct domains, AI analyst-produced analyses exhibit substantial dispersion in effect sizes, pp-values, and conclusions. This dispersion can be traced to identifiable analytic choices in preprocessing, model specification, and inference that vary systematically across LLM and persona conditions. Critically, the outcomes are steerable: reassigning the analyst persona or LLM shifts the distribution of results even among methodologically sound runs. These results highlight a central challenge for AI-automated empirical science: when defensible analyses are cheap to generate, evidence becomes abundant and vulnerable to selective reporting. Yet the same capability that creates this risk may also help address it: treating analyst results as distributions makes analytic uncertainty visible, and deploying AI analysts against a published specification can reveal how much disagreement stems from underspecified design choices. Taken together, our results motivate a new transparency norm: AI-generated analyses should be accompanied by multiverse-style reporting and full disclosure of the prompts used, on par with code and data.
Feb 16, 2026

Tool-Aware Planning in Contact Center AI: Evaluating LLMs through Lineage-Guided Query Decomposition

We present a domain-grounded framework and benchmark for tool-aware plan generation in contact centers, where answering a query for business insights, our target use case, requires decomposing it into executable steps over structured tools (Text2SQL (T2S)/Snowflake) and unstructured tools (RAG/transcripts) with explicit depends_on for parallelism. Our contributions are threefold: (i) a reference-based plan evaluation framework operating in two modes - a metric-wise evaluator spanning seven dimensions (e.g., tool-prompt alignment, query adherence) and a one-shot evaluator; (ii) a data curation methodology that iteratively refines plans via an evaluator->optimizer loop to produce high-quality plan lineages (ordered plan revisions) while reducing manual effort; and (iii) a large-scale study of 14 LLMs across sizes and families for their ability to decompose queries into step-by-step, executable, and tool-assigned plans, evaluated under prompts with and without lineage. Empirically, LLMs struggle on compound queries and on plans exceeding 4 steps (typically 5-15); the best total metric score reaches 84.8% (Claude-3-7-Sonnet), while the strongest one-shot match rate at the "A+" tier (Extremely Good, Very Good) is only 49.75% (o3-mini). Plan lineage yields mixed gains overall but benefits several top models and improves step executability for many. Our results highlight persistent gaps in tool-understanding, especially in tool-prompt alignment and tool-usage completeness, and show that shorter, simpler plans are markedly easier. The framework and findings provide a reproducible path for assessing and improving agentic planning with tools for answering data-analysis queries in contact-center settings.
Dec 15, 2025

MedInsightBench: Evaluating Medical Analytics Agents Through Multi-Step Insight Discovery in Multimodal Medical Data

In medical data analysis, extracting deep insights from complex, multi-modal datasets is essential for improving patient care, increasing diagnostic accuracy, and optimizing healthcare operations. However, there is currently a lack of high-quality datasets specifically designed to evaluate the ability of large multi-modal models (LMMs) to discover medical insights. In this paper, we introduce MedInsightBench, the first benchmark that comprises 332 carefully curated medical cases, each annotated with thoughtfully designed insights. This benchmark is intended to evaluate the ability of LMMs and agent frameworks to analyze multi-modal medical image data, including posing relevant questions, interpreting complex findings, and synthesizing actionable insights and recommendations. Our analysis indicates that existing LMMs exhibit limited performance on MedInsightBench, which is primarily attributed to their challenges in extracting multi-step, deep insights and the absence of medical expertise. Therefore, we propose MedInsightAgent, an automated agent framework for medical data analysis, composed of three modules: Visual Root Finder, Analytical Insight Agent, and Follow-up Question Composer. Experiments on MedInsightBench highlight pervasive challenges and demonstrate that MedInsightAgent can improve the performance of general LMMs in medical data insight discovery.
Nov 25, 2025

CLIMATEAGENT: Multi-Agent Orchestration for Complex Climate Data Science Workflows

Climate science demands automated workflows to transform comprehensive questions into data-driven statements across massive, heterogeneous datasets. However, generic LLM agents and static scripting pipelines lack climate-specific context and flexibility and thus perform poorly in practice. We present ClimateAgent, an autonomous multi-agent framework that orchestrates end-to-end climate data analytic workflows. ClimateAgent decomposes user questions into executable subtasks coordinated by an Orchestrate-Agent and a Plan-Agent; acquires data via specialized Data-Agents that dynamically introspect APIs to synthesize robust download scripts; and completes analysis and reporting with a Coding-Agent that generates Python code, visualizations, and a final report with a built-in self-correction loop. To enable systematic evaluation, we introduce Climate-Agent-Bench-85, a benchmark of 85 real-world tasks spanning atmospheric rivers, drought, extreme precipitation, heat waves, sea surface temperature, and tropical cyclones. On Climate-Agent-Bench-85, ClimateAgent achieves 100% task completion and a report quality score of 8.32, outperforming GitHub Copilot (6.27) and a GPT-5 baseline (3.26). These results demonstrate that our multi-agent orchestration with dynamic API awareness and self-correcting execution substantially advances reliable, end-to-end automation for climate science analytic tasks. The source code of ClimateAgent is available at https://github.com/Relaxed-System-Lab/ClimateAgent.
Oct 1, 2025

Domain-Specific Agents for Cherenkov Telescope Array Control Software and Gamma-Ray Data Analysis

We present domain-adapted large language model agents designed to support Cherenkov Telescope Array operation and data analysis. The agents combine contextual knowledge with automated validation and iterative correction to produce more reliable outputs. This approach reduces manual effort, improves consistency, and helps accelerate operational and scientific workflows. The results demonstrate the potential of agentic systems as practical assistants in specialized research environments.
Jul 28, 2025

GenoMAS: Guided Multi-Agent Programming for Scientific Discovery from Genomic Data

Gene expression analysis holds the key to many biomedical discoveries, yet extracting insights from raw transcriptomic data remains challenging due to the complexity of multiple large, semi-structured files and the need for extensive domain expertise. Current approaches either rely on inflexible workflows that fail in edge cases or fully autonomous agents that lack the precision required for rigorous scientific inquiry. GenoMAS addresses this by presenting a team of LLM-based agents that integrates structured workflows with autonomous adaptability, orchestrating diverse specialized agents through typed message-passing protocols. At its core lies a guided-planning framework where programming agents decompose task guidelines into Action Units and dynamically choose to advance, revise, bypass, or backtrack, maintaining logical coherence while adapting to the idiosyncrasies of genomic data. On the GenoTEX benchmark, GenoMAS achieves 89.13% CSC for data preprocessing and 60.48% F1F_1 for identifying trait-associated genes, surpassing prior art by 10.61% and 16.85%. Beyond transcriptomics, it outperforms strong agent baselines on ScienceAgentBench and DiscoveryBench, two independent bioinformatics benchmarks. Qualitative analysis shows that GenoMAS identifies gene-phenotype associations that are biologically plausible and corroborated by the literature.
Jun 12, 2025

AutoMind: Adaptive Knowledgeable Agent for Automated Data Science

Large Language Model (LLM) agents have shown great potential in addressing real-world data science problems. LLM-driven data science agents promise to automate the entire machine learning pipeline, yet their real-world effectiveness remains limited. Existing frameworks depend on rigid, pre-defined workflows and inflexible coding strategies; consequently, they excel only on relatively simple, classical problems and fail to capture the empirical expertise that human practitioners bring to complex, innovative tasks. In this work, we introduce AutoMind, an adaptive, knowledgeable LLM-agent framework that overcomes these deficiencies through three key advances: (1) a curated expert knowledge base that grounds the agent in domain expert knowledge, (2) an agentic knowledgeable tree search algorithm that strategically explores possible solutions, and (3) a self-adaptive coding strategy that dynamically tailors code generation to task complexity. Evaluations on two automated data science benchmarks demonstrate that AutoMind delivers superior performance versus state-of-the-art baselines. Additional analyses confirm favorable effectiveness, efficiency, and qualitative solution quality, highlighting AutoMind as an efficient and robust step toward fully automated data science. Code is at https://github.com/zjunlp/AutoMind.