[2608.13331] Training AI Scientists to Replicate Research

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arXiv:2608.13331 (cs)

[Submitted on 13 Aug 2026]

Title:Training AI Scientists to Replicate Research

Authors:Damon Falck, Samer Sabri, Anja Surina, Thom Foster, Anya Sims, Sam Devlin, Dylan Rogers, Tantum Collins, Kaloyan Aleksiev, Louis Kirsch, Edward Hughes<br>View a PDF of the paper titled Training AI Scientists to Replicate Research, by Damon Falck and 10 other authors

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Abstract:The replicability of papers is a cornerstone of scientific knowledge, ensuring the reliability of existing results and providing a base for further experiments. The act of replication typically illuminates details that were previously underspecified, and thus requires similar hypothesis-driven exploration to open-ended research. In this work, we develop Replica, a scalable task space for paper replication. To provide reward signal, we introduce an auto-generated rubric-based judge that has low noise and agrees with human assessment of replication quality. We post-train Faraday, a 27B-parameter "AI Scientist" agent that leverages coding agents as tools, surpassing the performance of Claude Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5 on held-out replication tasks. Qualitative analysis of individual rollouts reveals that Faraday adopts a more scientifically-principled approach. We believe that our results provide a stepping stone towards AI agents capable of long-horizon scientific innovation without requiring complex harnesses.

Comments:<br>47 pages, 12 figures

Subjects:

Machine Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

Cite as:<br>arXiv:2608.13331 [cs.LG]

(or<br>arXiv:2608.13331v1 [cs.LG] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.13331

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arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

Submission history<br>From: Damon Falck [view email]<br>[v1]<br>Thu, 13 Aug 2026 14:59:27 UTC (1,218 KB)

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