One Reflection Is Not Enough: Self-Correcting Autonomous Research via Multi-Hypothesis Failure Attribution
Autonomous research agents can now draft hypotheses, write code, run experiments, and produce papers, but they remain brittle when experiments fail. Under the prevailing paradigm, failure recovery is usually delegated to a single free-form reflection: a rich trajectory of metrics, logs, and design choices is compressed into one verbal critique, which often leads either to localized trial-and-error or to hard pivots that discard useful context. We propose SAGE, a Self-correcting, Autonomous, Grounded Experimenter, to tackle this failure-recovery bottleneck. Its core mechanism, Multi-Hypothesis Failure Attribution (MHFA), treats recovery as a structured causal diagnosis. By analyzing dynami...
| Authors | Jie Ma, Binfei Chu, Jie Gao et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 30 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 30 June 2026 |
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