Into the Unknown: Benchmarking AI agents on open scientific research problems
Can AI agents carry out research on open scientific problems? We introduce Into the Unknown, a benchmark that provides an agent with a science paper along with a research direction to pursue and tasks it to write a follow-up paper. We work with scientists at US Department of Energy (DOE) national laboratories, who each contribute an unpublished follow-up direction from their own work together with the necessary conditions a submission must meet. While assessing the quality of a follow-up paper is challenging in general, using these conditions to form a rubric makes evaluation more tractable for research problems that have no reference answer. We have nine frontier agents write 15 follow-u...
| Authors | Seungone Kim, Jiayi Geng, Young-Jun Lee et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 13 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 13 October 2026 |
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