🔬 Can AI actually "discover" science? Tested on 90 real Nature papers, even the strongest agent beat SOTA on under 20% of tasks.
Title: NatureBench: Can Coding Agents Match the Published SOTA of Nature-Family Papers?
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📋 Overview
Using 90 tasks drawn from Nature-family journals across six domains, this work tests whether AI coding agents can reproduce and surpass published SOTA. An "information firewall" hides the original method, and NatureGym builds per-task containerized environments for strict, unified evaluation with web search disabled.
🎯 The problem it solves
Prior agent-on-research benchmarks were fragmented and low in credibility. This work forces genuine discovery instead of reproduction and creates a common ground for cross-domain comparison.
📐 Methodology
Tasks are scored with a SOTA-normalized relative gap (g > 0.1 to surpass, g >= 0 to match), comparing across 81 metrics. Ten agents are evaluated across three harnesses under a 4-hour budget with task-based GPU allocation.
📊 Results
・Even the top agent, Claude Opus 4.7, surpassed SOTA on only 17.8% of tasks and matched on 47.8%
・45.5% of successes were just translating a science task into supervised prediction; genuine domain reasoning was only 8.3%
・Failures were driven by wrong method choice (45.1%) and insufficient compute (24.4%), with task misunderstanding at only 3.1%
・Interdisciplinary tasks consistently scored worse
A sober snapshot: today's agents are good at "translation" but weak at real "discovery."
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CodingAgents#