# AIM: Agentic Idea Management for Automated Research

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.38445 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.38445/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 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 21 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Sep 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Web, search, and research agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/web-search-and-research-agents/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Instruction-Following Evaluation for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07911/) (2023)
- [The AI Scientist: Towards Fully Automated Open-Ended Scientific Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06292/) (2024)
- [Gemini: A Family of Highly Capable Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11805/) (2023)
- [AlphaEvolve: A coding agent for scientific and algorithmic discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.13131/) (2025)
- [The AI Scientist-v2: Workshop-Level Automated Scientific Discovery via Agentic Tree Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08066/) (2025)
- [AIDE: AI-Driven Exploration in the Space of Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13138/) (2025)
- [Gemini Embedding: Generalizable Embeddings from Gemini](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07891/) (2025)
- [MLR-Copilot: Autonomous Machine Learning Research based on Large Language Models Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.14033/) (2024)
- [AdaEvolve: Adaptive LLM Driven Zeroth-Order Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.20133/) (2026)
- [EvoX: Meta-Evolution for Automated Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.23413/) (2026)
- [CodeScientist: End-to-End Semi-Automated Scientific Discovery with Code-based Experimentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22708/) (2025)
- [InternAgent: When Agent Becomes the Scientist -- Building Closed-Loop System from Hypothesis to Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16938/) (2025)
- [ResearchGym: Evaluating Language Model Agents on Real-World AI Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.15112/) (2026)
- [Toward Generalist Autonomous Research via Hypothesis-Tree Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.11926/) (2026)
- [ScientistOne: Towards Human-Level Autonomous Research via Chain-of-Evidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.26340/) (2026)
- [AutoLab: Can Frontier Models Solve Long-Horizon Auto Research and Engineering Tasks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.05080/) (2026)
- [AI Research Preference Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.13940/) (2026)
- [DS-STAR: Data Science Agent for Solving Diverse Tasks across Heterogeneous Formats and Open-Ended Queries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21825/) (2025)
- [HARPA: A Testability-Driven, Literature-Grounded Framework for Research Ideation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.00620/) (2025)
- [Exploration and Exploitation Errors Are Measurable for Language Model Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.13151/) (2026)
- [Multi-Agent LLMs Fail to Explore Each Other](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.11250/) (2026)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [SHELDON: Reasoning through Dual Search over Hypothesis and Observation Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.18025/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Frontier LLMs are increasingly used to automate scientific research through iterative search. We distinguish idea-driven search from solution-driven search and identify three core challenges: organizing evolving research ideas, selecting promising directions, and maintaining alignment between ideas and their implementations. To address these challenges, we introduce the Agentic Idea Manager (AIM), a fully autonomous framework for managing and exploring research directions in idea-driven automated research. Inspired by Bayesian optimization, AIM uses an Agentic Surrogate and an Agentic Acquisition mechanism to organize discovered ideas and guide their selection. A Solution Auditor maintains idea-solution integrity, while a Resource Planner adaptively allocates the remaining experimental budget across parallel search branches. Experiments on 10 AutoLab benchmark tasks show that AIM surpasses the strongest baseline by 1.6 percentage points on System Optimization tasks and 4.9 percentage points on long-horizon Model Development & CUDA tasks. Notably, AIM reaches the best baseline performance up to 3.1x faster in wall-clock time. We further provide a theoretical analysis of when searching over ideas becomes beneficial. Our analysis shows that explicit idea-level allocation makes semantic coverage directly controllable, and that broader coverage becomes increasingly valuable when competitive research directions are sparse among many plausible alternatives. Project Page: https://imhgchoi.github.io/agentic-idea-manager/