# Can AI Scientists Coordinate at Runtime?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.00980 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.00980/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 24 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Oct 2026.

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

- [AutoGen: Enabling Next-Gen LLM Applications via Multi-Agent Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08155/) (2023)
- [MetaGPT: Meta Programming for A Multi-Agent Collaborative Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00352/) (2023)
- [Improving Factuality and Reasoning in Language Models through Multiagent Debate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14325/) (2023)
- [The AI Scientist: Towards Fully Automated Open-Ended Scientific Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06292/) (2024)
- [Why Do Multi-Agent LLM Systems Fail?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13657/) (2025)
- [Agent Laboratory: Using LLM Agents as Research Assistants](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.04227/) (2025)
- [The AI Scientist-v2: Workshop-Level Automated Scientific Discovery via Agentic Tree Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08066/) (2025)
- [Accelerating scientific discovery with Co-Scientist](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.18864/) (2025)
- [A Dynamic LLM-Powered Agent Network for Task-Oriented Agent Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.02170/) (2023)
- [AI Agents That Matter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01502/) (2024)
- [DiscoveryBench: Towards Data-Driven Discovery with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01725/) (2024)
- [AI-Researcher: Autonomous Scientific Innovation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18705/) (2025)
- [EvoScientist: Towards Multi-Agent Evolving AI Scientists for End-to-End Scientific Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.08127/) (2026)
- [Training AI Co-Scientists Using Rubric Rewards](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.23707/) (2025)
- [AutoResearchClaw: Self-Reinforcing Autonomous Research with Human-AI Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.20025/) (2026)
- [ResearchClawBench: A Benchmark for End-to-End Autonomous Scientific Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.07591/) (2026)
- [ARIS: Autonomous Research via Adversarial Multi-Agent Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.03042/) (2026)
- [Build Your Personalized Research Group: A Multiagent Framework for Continual and Interactive Science Automation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.15624/) (2025)
- [AutoScientists: Self-Organizing Agent Teams for Long-Running Scientific Experimentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.28655/) (2026)
- [How Do Agents Fail on AutoResearch: End-to-End Diagnostic Evaluation on 100 Real-World Frontier Research Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.14905/) (2026)
- [Can AI Evaluate AI Scientists? A Benchmarking Study of Autonomous Research Generation Systems Using Automated Multi-Model Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.28631/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multi-agent AI scientists have shown improving performance across a diverse range of tasks. Yet a common approach is design-time agentic orchestration, which typically relies on fixed workflows. In contrast, human scientists coordinate and adjust their division of labor at runtime. We therefore ask: can AI scientists also coordinate at runtime? To this end, we introduce Runtime Agent Coordination (RAC), which selects agents from existing AI-scientist hosts during execution, assigns scoped work contracts, and provides artifact-grounded verification. Verification informs subsequent agents without blocking transitions or discarding artifacts. We conduct a single-seed exploratory evaluation across Agent Laboratory, EvoScientist, and ARK on ResearchClawBench, preserving host models, tools, and permissions under host-calibrated budgets. Four cumulative conditions separate native execution, runtime communication, runtime selection, and the combined addition of contracts and verification. Runtime selection yields the highest observed mean score for each host; adding contracts and verification reduces these means, with host-dependent outcomes relative to native execution. These results motivate runtime coordination while exposing the limits of additional coordination mechanisms under constrained budgets. Code is available at https://github.com/systemind-team/Runtime-AI-Scientist.