# AI4Research: A Survey of Artificial Intelligence for Scientific Research

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.01903 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.01903/

## Key facts

- Cited by 60 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Knowledge- and tool-augmented reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Jul 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Knowledge- and tool-augmented reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/knowledge-and-tool-augmented-reasoning/)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 60)

- [A Survey of Context Engineering for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.13334/) (2025)
- [From AI for Science to Agentic Science: A Survey on Autonomous Scientific Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.14111/) (2025)
- [EvoScientist: Towards Multi-Agent Evolving AI Scientists for End-to-End Scientific Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.08127/) (2026)
- [ReportBench: Evaluating Deep Research Agents via Academic Survey Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.15804/) (2025)
- [A Survey of Scientific Large Language Models: From Data Foundations to Agent Frontiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.21148/) (2025)
- [Paper2Video: Automatic Video Generation from Scientific Papers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.05096/) (2025)
- [Copyright Protection for Large Language Models: A Survey of Methods, Challenges, and Trends](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.11548/) (2025)
- [ViTCoT: Video-Text Interleaved Chain-of-Thought for Boosting Video Understanding in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.09876/) (2025)
- [RSIBench-Data: Benchmarking Data-Centric Research for Recursive Self-Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.25886/) (2026)
- [PMark: Towards Robust and Distortion-free Semantic-level Watermarking with Channel Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21057/) (2025)
- [CoDA: Agentic Systems for Collaborative Data Visualization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.03194/) (2025)
- [Jr. AI Scientist and Its Risk Report: Autonomous Scientific Exploration from a Baseline Paper](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.04583/) (2025)
- [LLM-AutoSciLab: Closed-Loop Scientific Discovery via Active Experimentation with LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.24043/) (2026)
- [HealthFlow: A Self-Evolving AI Agent with Meta Planning for Autonomous Healthcare Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02621/) (2025)
- [Scaling Generalist Data-Analytic Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25084/) (2025)
- [AI for Auto-Research: Roadmap & User Guide](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.18661/) (2026)
- [Can We Predict Before Executing Machine Learning Agents?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.05930/) (2026)
- [AutoResearch AI: Towards AI-Powered Research Automation for Scientific Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.23204/) (2026)
- [Evolving Roles of LLMs in Scientific Innovation: Assistant, Collaborator, Scientist, and Evaluator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.11810/) (2025)
- [Agent2World: Learning to Generate Symbolic World Models via Adaptive Multi-Agent Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.22336/) (2025)
- [InnoEval: On Research Idea Evaluation as a Knowledge-Grounded, Multi-Perspective Reasoning Problem](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.14367/) (2026)
- [RebuttalAgent: Strategic Persuasion in Academic Rebuttal via Theory of Mind](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.15715/) (2026)
- [From Chatbot to Digital Colleague: The Paradigm Shift Toward Persistent Autonomous AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.14502/) (2026)
- [Beyond NL2Code: A Structured Survey of Multimodal Code Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.15932/) (2026)
- [Emergent Risks in Generative Multi-Agent Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.27771/) (2026)
- [HiRAS: A Hierarchical Multi-Agent Framework for Paper-to-Code Generation and Execution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.17745/) (2026)
- [OMIBench: Benchmarking Olympiad-Level Multi-Image Reasoning in Large Vision-Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.20806/) (2026)
- [Rewarding the Scientific Process: Process-Level Reward Modeling for Agentic Data Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.24198/) (2026)
- [SciIntegrity-Bench: A Benchmark for Evaluating Academic Integrity in AI Scientist Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.10246/) (2026)
- [Let's Think with Images Efficiently! An Interleaved-Modal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Framework with Dynamic and Precise Visual Thoughts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.21754/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly in large language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI-o1 and DeepSeek-R1, have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex domains such as logical reasoning and experimental coding. Motivated by these advancements, numerous studies have explored the application of AI in the innovation process, particularly in the context of scientific research. These AI technologies primarily aim to develop systems that can autonomously conduct research processes across a wide range of scientific disciplines. Despite these significant strides, a comprehensive survey on AI for Research (AI4Research) remains absent, which hampers our understanding and impedes further development in this field. To address this gap, we present a comprehensive survey and offer a unified perspective on AI4Research. Specifically, the main contributions of our work are as follows: (1) Systematic taxonomy: We first introduce a systematic taxonomy to classify five mainstream tasks in AI4Research. (2) New frontiers: Then, we identify key research gaps and highlight promising future directions, focusing on the rigor and scalability of automated experiments, as well as the societal impact. (3) Abundant applications and resources: Finally, we compile a wealth of resources, including relevant multidisciplinary applications, data corpora, and tools. We hope our work will provide the research community with quick access to these resources and stimulate innovative breakthroughs in AI4Research.
