AI4Research: A Survey of Artificial Intelligence for Scientific Research

Recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly in large language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI-o1 and DeepSeek-R1, have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex domains such as logical reasoning and experimental coding. Motivated by these advancements, numerous studies have explored the application of AI in the innovation process, particularly in the context of scientific research. These AI technologies primarily aim to develop systems that can autonomously conduct research processes across a wide range of scientific disciplines. Despite these significant strides, a comprehensive survey on AI for Research (AI4Research) remains absent, which hampers our understanding and impedes further development in this field. To address this gap, we present a comprehensive survey and offer a unified perspective on AI4Research. Specifically, the main contributions of our work are as follows: (1) Systematic taxonomy: We first introduce a systematic taxonomy to classify five mainstream tasks in AI4Research. (2) New frontiers: Then, we identify key research gaps and highlight promising future directions, focusing on the rigor and scalability of automated experiments, as well as the societal impact. (3) Abundant applications and resources: Finally, we compile a wealth of resources, including relevant multidisciplinary applications, data corpora, and tools. We hope our work will provide the research community with quick access to these resources and stimulate innovative breakthroughs in AI4Research.

Cross-Hierarchical Bidirectional Consistency Learning for Fine-Grained Visual Classification

Fine-Grained Visual Classification (FGVC) aims to categorize closely related subclasses, a task complicated by minimal inter-class differences and significant intra-class variance. Existing methods often rely on additional annotations for image classification, overlooking the valuable information embedded in Tree Hierarchies that depict hierarchical label relationships. To leverage this knowledge to improve classification accuracy and consistency, we propose a novel Cross-Hierarchical Bidirectional Consistency Learning (CHBC) framework. The CHBC framework extracts discriminative features across various hierarchies using a specially designed module to decompose and enhance attention masks and features. We employ bidirectional consistency loss to regulate the classification outcomes across different hierarchies, ensuring label prediction consistency and reducing misclassification. Experiments on three widely used FGVC datasets validate the effectiveness of the CHBC framework. Ablation studies further investigate the application strategies of feature enhancement and consistency constraints, underscoring the significant contributions of the proposed modules.