SciAgentGym: Benchmarking Multi-Step Scientific Tool-use in LLM Agents
On the map: LLM reasoning → Reasoning for agents, planning and code
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Abstract (arXiv)
Scientific reasoning inherently demands integrating sophisticated toolkits to navigate domain-specific knowledge. Yet, current benchmarks largely overlook agents' ability to orchestrate tools for such rigorous workflows. To bridge this gap, we introduce SciAgentGym, a scalable interactive environment featuring 1,780 domain-specific tools across four natural science disciplines, supported by a robust execution infrastructure. Complementing this, we present SciAgentBench, a tiered evaluation suite designed to stress-test agentic capabilities from elementary actions to long-horizon workflows. Our evaluation identifies a critical bottleneck: state-of-the-art models still struggle with complex scientific tool-use, and their performance degrades substantially as interaction horizons extend. To address this, we propose SciForge, a data synthesis method that models the tool action space as a dependency graph to generate logic-aware training trajectories. By fine-tuning on these trajectories, our SciAgent-8B outperforms the significantly larger Qwen3-VL-235B-Instruct while exhibiting positive cross-domain transfer of scientific tool-use capabilities. These results underscore the promising potential of next-generation autonomous scientific agents.
Key facts. Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Reasoning for agents, planning and code, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 26 of its 38 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 13 Feb 2026.
Builds on
26 of 38 references.
References · 26
- 2023GPT-4 Technical Reportcited by 18,132
- 2025Qwen3 Technical Reportcited by 8,195
- 2023GPQA: A Graduate-Level Google-Proof Q&A Benchmarkcited by 2,748
- 2023WebArena: A Realistic Web Environment for Building Autonomous Agentscited by 1,908
- 2022Learn to Explain: Multimodal Reasoning via Thought Chains for Science Question Answeringcited by 1,881
- 2023ToolLLM: Facilitating Large Language Models to Master 16000+ Real-world APIscited by 1,880
- 2024τ-bench: A Benchmark for Tool-Agent-User Interaction in Real-World Domainscited by 1,280
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- 2025Search-o1: Agentic Search-Enhanced Large Reasoning Modelscited by 423
14 more
- 2023SciBench: Evaluating College-Level Scientific Problem-Solving Abilities of Large Language Modelscited by 246
- 2023On the Tool Manipulation Capability of Open-source Large Language Modelscited by 122
- 2024DISCOVERYWORLD: A Virtual Environment for Developing and Evaluating Automated Scientific Discovery Agentscited by 89
- 2025From AI for Science to Agentic Science: A Survey on Autonomous Scientific Discoverycited by 74
- 2024SciAgent: Tool-augmented Language Models for Scientific Reasoningcited by 69
- 2025AgentGym-RL: Training LLM Agents for Long-Horizon Decision Making through Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learningcited by 68
- 2025SciMaster: Towards General-Purpose Scientific AI Agents, Part I. X-Master as Foundation: Can We Lead on Humanity's Last Exam?cited by 45
- 2024SciInstruct: a Self-Reflective Instruction Annotated Dataset for Training Scientific Language Modelscited by 38
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- 2025R-Bench: Graduate-level Multi-disciplinary Benchmarks for LLM & MLLM Complex Reasoning Evaluationcited by 32
- 2025debug-gym: A Text-Based Environment for Interactive Debuggingcited by 19
- 2025RBench-V: A Primary Assessment for Visual Reasoning Models with Multi-modal Outputscited by 16
- 2025BMMR: A Large-Scale Bilingual Multimodal Multi-Discipline Reasoning Datasetcited by 11
- 2025A Survey of AI for Materials Science: Foundation Models, LLM Agents, Datasets, and Toolscited by 7
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 12.
12 papers.
- 2026HINTBench: Horizon-agent Intrinsic Non-attack Trajectory Benchmarkcited by 8
- 2026Agentic Environment Engineering for Large Language Models: A Survey of Environment Modeling, Synthesis, Evaluation, and Applicationcited by 8
- 20266GAgentGym: Tool Use, Data Synthesis, and Agentic Learning for Network Managementcited by 3
- 2026AlphaEval: Evaluating Agents in Productioncited by 1
- 2026AgentTrails: Towards Trust and Reuse for Agentic Taskscited by 1
- 2026FrontierChallenge: Evaluating Scientific Workflow Completioncited by 1
- 2026Process-Reward Tactic Evolution for Long-Horizon Bioinformatics Workflowscited by 0
- 2026Molecular LLM Agents: From Architectural Design to Scientific Autonomycited by 0
- 2026EarthVerse: Benchmarking Scientific Agents Across Dynamic Earth Systems and Natural Hazardscited by 0
- 2026WhatWorkedBench: Benchmarking Experimental Understanding in AI Agentscited by 0
- 2026The Marathon of Scientific Reasoning: Robustness of Scientific Agents to Perturbations in Multi-Turn Interactionscited by 0
- 2026Agents Are Systems, Not Models: Rethinking Agentic Evaluationcited by 0
- 2026Agents Are Systems, Not Models: Rethinking Agentic Evaluation1 Oct 2026
- 2026The Marathon of Scientific Reasoning: Robustness of Scientific Agents to Perturbations in Multi-Turn Interactions28 Sep 2026
- 2026WhatWorkedBench: Benchmarking Experimental Understanding in AI Agents23 Sep 2026
- 2026FrontierChallenge: Evaluating Scientific Workflow Completion25 Aug 2026
- 2026EarthVerse: Benchmarking Scientific Agents Across Dynamic Earth Systems and Natural Hazards24 Aug 2026
- 2026Molecular LLM Agents: From Architectural Design to Scientific Autonomy24 Aug 2026
- 2026AgentTrails: Towards Trust and Reuse for Agentic Tasks21 Jul 2026
- 2026Process-Reward Tactic Evolution for Long-Horizon Bioinformatics Workflows18 Jun 2026
- 2026Agentic Environment Engineering for Large Language Models: A Survey of Environment Modeling, Synthesis, Evaluation, and Application10 Jun 2026
- 2026HINTBench: Horizon-agent Intrinsic Non-attack Trajectory Benchmark15 Apr 2026
- 2026AlphaEval: Evaluating Agents in Production14 Apr 2026
- 20266GAgentGym: Tool Use, Data Synthesis, and Agentic Learning for Network Management31 Mar 2026
Similar, not cited
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- 2026AgentEscapeBench: Evaluating Out-of-Domain Tool-Grounded Reasoning in LLM Agents
- 2026Benchmarking AI Agents for Addressing Scientific Challenges Across Scales
- 2025SciToolAgent: A Knowledge Graph-Driven Scientific Agent for Multi-Tool Integration
- 2024ScienceAgentBench: Toward Rigorous Assessment of Language Agents for Data-Driven Scientific Discovery
- 2025Bohrium + SciMaster: Building the Infrastructure and Ecosystem for Agentic Science at Scale
- 2026Beyond Static Tools: Test-Time Tool Evolution for Scientific Reasoning
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