mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

SciAgentGym: Benchmarking Multi-Step Scientific Tool-use in LLM Agents

arXiv 2602.12984 ↗First posted 13 Feb 2026cs.CLcited by 12

On the map: LLM reasoning → Reasoning for agents, planning and code

also in 1 more
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

  1. 2023GPT-4 Technical Reportcited by 18,132
  2. 2025Qwen3 Technical Reportcited by 8,195
  3. 2023GPQA: A Graduate-Level Google-Proof Q&A Benchmarkcited by 2,748
  4. 2023WebArena: A Realistic Web Environment for Building Autonomous Agentscited by 1,908
  5. 2022Learn to Explain: Multimodal Reasoning via Thought Chains for Science Question Answeringcited by 1,881
  6. 2023ToolLLM: Facilitating Large Language Models to Master 16000+ Real-world APIscited by 1,880
  7. 2024τ-bench: A Benchmark for Tool-Agent-User Interaction in Real-World Domainscited by 1,280
  8. 2023AgentBench: Evaluating LLMs as Agentscited by 1,211
  9. 2018On Evaluation of Embodied Navigation Agentscited by 526
  10. 2024MMMU-Pro: A More Robust Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding Benchmarkcited by 494
  11. 2025GLM-4.5: Agentic, Reasoning, and Coding (ARC) Foundation Modelscited by 446
  12. 2025Search-o1: Agentic Search-Enhanced Large Reasoning Modelscited by 423
14 more
  1. 2023SciBench: Evaluating College-Level Scientific Problem-Solving Abilities of Large Language Modelscited by 246
  2. 2023On the Tool Manipulation Capability of Open-source Large Language Modelscited by 122
  3. 2024DISCOVERYWORLD: A Virtual Environment for Developing and Evaluating Automated Scientific Discovery Agentscited by 89
  4. 2025From AI for Science to Agentic Science: A Survey on Autonomous Scientific Discoverycited by 74
  5. 2024SciAgent: Tool-augmented Language Models for Scientific Reasoningcited by 69
  6. 2025AgentGym-RL: Training LLM Agents for Long-Horizon Decision Making through Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learningcited by 68
  7. 2025SciMaster: Towards General-Purpose Scientific AI Agents, Part I. X-Master as Foundation: Can We Lead on Humanity's Last Exam?cited by 45
  8. 2024SciInstruct: a Self-Reflective Instruction Annotated Dataset for Training Scientific Language Modelscited by 38
  9. 2025Scientists' First Exam: Probing Cognitive Abilities of MLLM via Perception, Understanding, and Reasoningcited by 33
  10. 2025R-Bench: Graduate-level Multi-disciplinary Benchmarks for LLM & MLLM Complex Reasoning Evaluationcited by 32
  11. 2025debug-gym: A Text-Based Environment for Interactive Debuggingcited by 19
  12. 2025RBench-V: A Primary Assessment for Visual Reasoning Models with Multi-modal Outputscited by 16
  13. 2025BMMR: A Large-Scale Bilingual Multimodal Multi-Discipline Reasoning Datasetcited by 11
  14. 2025A Survey of AI for Materials Science: Foundation Models, LLM Agents, Datasets, and Toolscited by 7

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 12.

12 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026AgentEscapeBench: Evaluating Out-of-Domain Tool-Grounded Reasoning in LLM Agents
  2. 2026Benchmarking AI Agents for Addressing Scientific Challenges Across Scales
  3. 2025SciToolAgent: A Knowledge Graph-Driven Scientific Agent for Multi-Tool Integration
  4. 2024ScienceAgentBench: Toward Rigorous Assessment of Language Agents for Data-Driven Scientific Discovery
  5. 2025Bohrium + SciMaster: Building the Infrastructure and Ecosystem for Agentic Science at Scale
  6. 2026Beyond Static Tools: Test-Time Tool Evolution for Scientific Reasoning
  7. 2025InnovatorBench: Evaluating Agents' Ability to Conduct Innovative LLM Research
  8. 2026Deploy-Master: Automating the Deployment of 50,000+ Agent-Ready Scientific Tools in One Day