Toward Autonomous Long-Horizon Engineering for ML Research

Published
Source
arXiv
Paper number
144
Field
Agents / Research
arXiv ID
2604.13018

Key points

  • Current autonomous AI systems struggle with long-horizon tasks that take hours to days and require sustained, coherent progress across multiple stages.
  • Machine learning research papers are often underspecified, forcing agents to infer missing implementation details and manage complex environment setup.
  • Interpreting delayed and noisy experimental feedback and maintaining project state continuity across iteration cycles pose major challenges.
  • AiScientist implements thin control over thick state, where the top-level Orchestrator uses concise summaries and detailed project information lives in a permission-scoped shared workspace.
  • It uses a File-as-Bus protocol for artifact-mediated coordination and leverages the structured organization of the shared workspace to preserve persistent state and cumulative progress.
  • Its hierarchical orchestration model lets the Orchestrator delegate tasks to Tier-1 specialist agents exposed as callable tools, such as paper-understanding, implementation, and experimentation experts.

Paper links

External research summaries. These are not HDATF publications or measured product results.

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