The AI Scientist-v2: Workshop-Level Automated Scientific Discovery via
  Agentic Tree Search
Authors: name: Yutaro Yamada; name: Robert Tjarko Lange; name: Cong Lu; name: Shengran Hu; name: Chris Lu; name: Jakob Foerster; name: Jeff Clune; name: David Ha
Published: 2025-04-10 18:44:41

Abstract: AI is increasingly playing a pivotal role in transforming how scientific
discoveries are made. We introduce The AI Scientist-v2, an end-to-end agentic
system capable of producing the first entirely AI generated
peer-review-accepted workshop paper. This system iteratively formulates
scientific hypotheses, designs and executes experiments, analyzes and
visualizes data, and autonomously authors scientific manuscripts. Compared to
its predecessor (v1, Lu et al., 2024 arXiv:2408.06292), The AI Scientist-v2
eliminates the reliance on human-authored code templates, generalizes
effectively across diverse machine learning domains, and leverages a novel
progressive agentic tree-search methodology managed by a dedicated experiment
manager agent. Additionally, we enhance the AI reviewer component by
integrating a Vision-Language Model (VLM) feedback loop for iterative
refinement of content and aesthetics of the figures. We evaluated The AI
Scientist-v2 by submitting three fully autonomous manuscripts to a
peer-reviewed ICLR workshop. Notably, one manuscript achieved high enough
scores to exceed the average human acceptance threshold, marking the first
instance of a fully AI-generated paper successfully navigating a peer review.
This accomplishment highlights the growing capability of AI in conducting all
aspects of scientific research. We anticipate that further advancements in
autonomous scientific discovery technologies will profoundly impact human
knowledge generation, enabling unprecedented scalability in research
productivity and significantly accelerating scientific breakthroughs, greatly
benefiting society at large. We have open-sourced the code at
https://github.com/SakanaAI/AI-Scientist-v2 to foster the future development of
this transformative technology. We also discuss the role of AI in science,
including AI safety.