AIRS-Bench: a Suite of Tasks for Frontier AI Research Science Agents

LLM agents hold significant promise for advancing scientific research. To accelerate this progress, we introduce AIRS-Bench (the AI Research Science Benchmark), a suite of 20 tasks sourced from state-of-the-art machine learning papers. These tasks span diverse domains, including language modeling, mathematics, bioinformatics, and time series forecasting. AIRS-Bench tasks assess agentic capabilities over the full research lifecycle -- including idea generation, experiment analysis and iterative refinement -- without providing baseline code. The AIRS-Bench task format is versatile, enabling easy integration of new tasks and rigorous comparison across different agentic frameworks. We establish baselines using frontier models paired with both sequential and parallel scaffolds. Our results show that agents exceed human SOTA in four tasks but fail to match it in sixteen others. Even when agents surpass human benchmarks, they do not reach the theoretical performance ceiling for the underlying tasks. These findings indicate that AIRS-Bench is far from saturated and offers substantial room for improvement. We open-source the AIRS-Bench task definitions and evaluation code to catalyze further development in autonomous scientific research.

Multi-Objective Deep Reinforcement Learning

We propose Deep Optimistic Linear Support Learning (DOL) to solve high-dimensional multi-objective decision problems where the relative importances of the objectives are not known a priori. Using features from the high-dimensional inputs, DOL computes the convex coverage set containing all potential optimal solutions of the convex combinations of the objectives. To our knowledge, this is the first time that deep reinforcement learning has succeeded in learning multi-objective policies. In addition, we provide a testbed with two experiments to be used as a benchmark for deep multi-objective reinforcement learning.