The Station: An Open-World Environment for AI-Driven Discovery
Authors: name: Stephen Chung, name: Wenyu Du

We introduce the STATION, an open-world multi-agent environment that models a
miniature scientific ecosystem. Leveraging their extended context windows,
agents in the Station can engage in long scientific journeys that include
reading papers from peers, formulating hypotheses, submitting code, performing
analyses, and publishing results. Importantly, there is no centralized system
coordinating their activities - agents are free to choose their own actions and
develop their own narratives within the Station. Experiments demonstrate that
AI agents in the Station achieve new state-of-the-art performance on a wide
range of benchmarks, spanning from mathematics to computational biology to
machine learning, notably surpassing AlphaEvolve in circle packing. A rich
tapestry of narratives emerges as agents pursue independent research, interact
with peers, and build upon a cumulative history. From these emergent
narratives, novel methods arise organically, such as a new density-adaptive
algorithm for scRNA-seq batch integration. The Station marks a first step
towards autonomous scientific discovery driven by emergent behavior in an
open-world environment, representing a new paradigm that moves beyond rigid
optimization.