AI科学家产生结果却不进行科学推理

AI scientists produce results without reasoning scientifically

AI 导读

一项针对LLM科学智能体的评估通过25,000余次运行发现，基础模型贡献了解释方差的41.4%，而脚手架仅占1.5%。数据显示，68%的推理轨迹忽略证据，仅26%出现反驳驱动的信念修正，且趋同多测试证据罕见。这些认知缺陷在工作流执行或假设探究中均存在，即使提供成功推理示例也无法改善。当前智能体虽能执行科学工作流，但不具备自我修正的科学推理模式，且基于结果的评估无法检测此类失败。

推荐理由

这篇论文给所有‘AI科学家’泼了冷水，LLM代理能跑出结果但根本不按科学推理来，证据忽视率68%，靠评估结果根本看不出问题，做科研自动化的该重新审视了。

正文 · 原文

Abstract:Large language model (LLM)-based systems are increasingly deployed to conduct scientific research autonomously, yet whether their reasoning adheres to the epistemic norms that make scientific inquiry self-correcting is poorly understood. Here, we evaluate LLM-based scientific agents across eight domains, spanning workflow execution to hypothesis-driven inquiry, through more than 25,000 agent runs and two complementary lenses: (i) a systematic performance analysis that decomposes the contributions of the base model and the agent scaffold, and (ii) a behavioral analysis of the epistemological structure of agent reasoning. We observe that the base model is the primary determinant of both performance and behavior, accounting for 41.4% of explained variance versus 1.5% for the scaffold. Across all configurations, evidence is ignored in 68% of traces, refutation-driven belief revision occurs in 26%, and convergent multi-test evidence is rare. The same reasoning pattern appears whether the agent executes a computational workflow or conducts hypothesis-driven inquiry. They persist even when agents receive near-complete successful reasoning trajectories as context, and the resulting unreliability compounds across repeated trials in epistemically demanding domains. Thus, current LLM-based agents execute scientific workflows but do not exhibit the epistemic patterns that characterize scientific reasoning. Outcome-based evaluation cannot detect these failures, and scaffold engineering alone cannot repair them. Until reasoning itself becomes a training target, the scientific knowledge produced by such agents cannot be justified by the process that generated it.

Subjects:	Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Materials Science (cond-mat.mtrl-sci); Machine Learning (cs.LG)
Cite as:	arXiv:2604.18805 [cs.AI]
	(or arXiv:2604.18805v1 [cs.AI] for this version)
	https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.18805 arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

AI科学家产生结果却不进行科学推理

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