ScienceFlow: A long-horizon agent for ML research, scientific discovery and beyond
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Web, search, and research agents
Abstract (arXiv)
Enabling LLM agents to sustain productive, stable, and goal-aligned research over extended horizons is a central challenge for autonomous machine learning and scientific discovery, as progress hinges on continuously managing evolving state, exploration decisions, and computational resources. Pioneering autoresearch agents, despite great success, still lack mechanisms for continuity, recovery from dead ends, and value-driven compute allocation, which inherently undermines overall search efficiency, wastes computational resources, and lowers the chance of ultimate success. To bridge this gap, we introduce ScienceFlow, an end-to-end autoresearch agent framework that organizes long-horizon research work into research segments grounded in executable workspaces. It represents research progress as recoverable executable states, enabling efficient exploration, revision, and execution. Transitions between research segments are governed by Executable-State Transition through Re-Anchoring (ESTRA), which selects either the live state or an archived state as the next anchor and determines whether to continue or redirect the research trajectory. An evidence-aware execution controller allocates resources to physical jobs based on resource availability, remaining budget, and validated progress. We evaluate ScienceFlow on tasks spanning machine learning, scientific modeling, and mathematical optimization. Results on diverse long-horizon benchmarks demonstrate its ability to sustain effective research processes, highlighted by a SOTA 70.22 percent Any-Medal score on the full MLE-bench within a 24-hour budget, outperforming prior reported results by 4.92 percentage points. The efficacy of ScienceFlow further demonstrates that efficient state management, adaptive exploration, and objective-aligned execution are critical for scaling autonomous research beyond short-horizon interactions.
Key facts. Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Web, search, and research agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 49 of its 75 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 14 Aug 2026.
Builds on
49 of 75 references.
Closest ancestors · 12
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- 2024MLE-bench: Evaluating Machine Learning Agents on Machine Learning Engineering9 Oct
- 2024DS-Agent: Automated Data Science by Empowering Large Language Models with Case-Based Reasoning27 Feb
Other references · 37
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