Haoyang Su

Yankai Jiang, Wenjie Lou, Lilong Wang et al.

We introduce SCP: the Science Context Protocol, an open-source standard designed to accelerate discovery by enabling a global network of autonomous scientific agents. SCP is built on two foundational pillars: (1) Unified Resource Integration: At its core, SCP provides a universal specification for describing and invoking scientific resources, spanning software tools, models, datasets, and physical instruments. This protocol-level standardization enables AI agents and applications to discover, call, and compose capabilities seamlessly across disparate platforms and institutional boundaries. (2) Orchestrated Experiment Lifecycle Management: SCP complements the protocol with a secure service architecture, which comprises a centralized SCP Hub and federated SCP Servers. This architecture manages the complete experiment lifecycle (registration, planning, execution, monitoring, and archival), enforces fine-grained authentication and authorization, and orchestrates traceable, end-to-end workflows that bridge computational and physical laboratories. Based on SCP, we have constructed a scientific discovery platform that offers researchers and agents a large-scale ecosystem of more than 1,600 tool resources. Across diverse use cases, SCP facilitates secure, large-scale collaboration between heterogeneous AI systems and human researchers while significantly reducing integration overhead and enhancing reproducibility. By standardizing scientific context and tool orchestration at the protocol level, SCP establishes essential infrastructure for scalable, multi-institution, agent-driven science.

Haoyang Su, Renqi Chen, Shixiang Tang et al.

The rapid advancement of scientific progress requires innovative tools that can accelerate knowledge discovery. Although recent AI methods, particularly large language models (LLMs), have shown promise in tasks such as hypothesis generation and experimental design, they fall short of replicating the collaborative nature of real-world scientific practices, where diverse experts work together in teams to tackle complex problems. To address the limitations, we propose an LLM-based multi-agent system, i.e., Virtual Scientists (VirSci), designed to mimic the teamwork inherent in scientific research. VirSci organizes a team of agents to collaboratively generate, evaluate, and refine research ideas. Through comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate that this multi-agent approach outperforms the state-of-the-art method in producing novel scientific ideas. We further investigate the collaboration mechanisms that contribute to its tendency to produce ideas with higher novelty, offering valuable insights to guide future research and illuminating pathways toward building a robust system for autonomous scientific discovery. The code is available at https://github.com/open-sciencelab/Virtual-Scientists.

Jie Ying, Zihong Chen, Zhefan Wang et al.

Seed science is essential for modern agriculture, directly influencing crop yields and global food security. However, challenges such as interdisciplinary complexity and high costs with limited returns hinder progress, leading to a shortage of experts and insufficient technological support. While large language models (LLMs) have shown promise across various fields, their application in seed science remains limited due to the scarcity of digital resources, complex gene-trait relationships, and the lack of standardized benchmarks. To address this gap, we introduce SeedBench -- the first multi-task benchmark specifically designed for seed science. Developed in collaboration with domain experts, SeedBench focuses on seed breeding and simulates key aspects of modern breeding processes. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of 26 leading LLMs, encompassing proprietary, open-source, and domain-specific fine-tuned models. Our findings not only highlight the substantial gaps between the power of LLMs and the real-world seed science problems, but also make a foundational step for research on LLMs for seed design.

Ziyu Sun, Haoyang Su, Hanqi Sun et al.

Mobile Crowd Sensing (MCS) is a promising paradigm that leverages mobile users and their smart portable devices to perform various real-world tasks. However, due to budget constraints and the inaccessibility of certain areas, Sparse MCS has emerged as a more practical alternative, collecting data from a limited number of target subareas and utilizing inference algorithms to complete the full sensing map. While existing approaches typically assume a time-discrete setting with data remaining constant within each sensing cycle, this simplification can introduce significant errors, especially when dealing with long cycles, as real-world sensing data often changes continuously. In this paper, we go from fine-grained completion, i.e., the subdivision of sensing cycles into minimal time units, towards a more accurate, time-continuous completion. We first introduce Deep Matrix Factorization (DMF) as a neural network-enabled framework and enhance it with a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN-DMF) to capture temporal correlations in these finer time slices. To further deal with the continuous data, we propose TIME-DMF, which captures temporal information across unequal intervals, enabling time-continuous completion. Additionally, we present the Query-Generate (Q-G) strategy within TIME-DMF to model the infinite states of continuous data. Extensive experiments across five types of sensing tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our models and the advantages of time-continuous completion.

Renqi Chen, Wenwei Han, Haohao Zhang et al.

Genomic selection (GS), as a critical crop breeding strategy, plays a key role in enhancing food production and addressing the global hunger crisis. The predominant approaches in GS currently revolve around employing statistical methods for prediction. However, statistical methods often come with two main limitations: strong statistical priors and linear assumptions. A recent trend is to capture the non-linear relationships between markers by deep learning. However, as crop datasets are commonly long sequences with limited samples, the robustness of deep learning models, especially Transformers, remains a challenge. In this work, to unleash the unexplored potential of attention mechanism for the task of interest, we propose a simple yet effective Transformer-based framework that enables end-to-end training of the whole sequence. Via experiments on rice3k and wheat3k datasets, we show that, with simple tricks such as k-mer tokenization and random masking, Transformer can achieve overall superior performance against seminal methods on GS tasks of interest.

Haoyang Su, Shaohao Rui, Jinyi Xiang et al.

Accurate and contrast-free Major Adverse Cardiac Events (MACE) prediction from Cine MRI sequences remains a critical challenge. Existing methods typically necessitate supervised learning based on human-refined masks in the ventricular myocardium, which become impractical without contrast agents. We introduce a self-supervised framework, namely Codebook-based Temporal-Spatial Learning (CTSL), that learns dynamic, spatiotemporal representations from raw Cine data without requiring segmentation masks. CTSL decouples temporal and spatial features through a multi-view distillation strategy, where the teacher model processes multiple Cine views, and the student model learns from reduced-dimensional Cine-SA sequences. By leveraging codebook-based feature representations and dynamic lesion self-detection through motion cues, CTSL captures intricate temporal dependencies and motion patterns. High-confidence MACE risk predictions are achieved through our model, providing a rapid, non-invasive solution for cardiac risk assessment that outperforms traditional contrast-dependent methods, thereby enabling timely and accessible heart disease diagnosis in clinical settings.

Renqi Chen, Haoyang Su, Shixiang Tang et al.

The Science of Science (SoS) explores the mechanisms underlying scientific discovery, and offers valuable insights for enhancing scientific efficiency and fostering innovation. Traditional approaches often rely on simplistic assumptions and basic statistical tools, such as linear regression and rule-based simulations, which struggle to capture the complexity and scale of modern research ecosystems. The advent of artificial intelligence (AI) presents a transformative opportunity for the next generation of SoS, enabling the automation of large-scale pattern discovery and uncovering insights previously unattainable. This paper offers a forward-looking perspective on the integration of Science of Science with AI for automated research pattern discovery and highlights key open challenges that could greatly benefit from AI. We outline the advantages of AI over traditional methods, discuss potential limitations, and propose pathways to overcome them. Additionally, we present a preliminary multi-agent system as an illustrative example to simulate research societies, showcasing AI's ability to replicate real-world research patterns and accelerate progress in Science of Science research.

Dingning Liu, Jinzhe Li, Haoyang Su et al.

Weed control is a critical challenge in modern agriculture, as weeds compete with crops for essential nutrient resources, significantly reducing crop yield and quality. Traditional weed control methods, including chemical and mechanical approaches, have real-life limitations such as associated environmental impact and efficiency. An emerging yet effective approach is laser weeding, which uses a laser beam as the stem cutter. Although there have been studies that use deep learning in weed recognition, its application in intelligent laser weeding still requires a comprehensive understanding. Thus, this study represents the first empirical investigation of weed recognition for laser weeding. To increase the efficiency of laser beam cut and avoid damaging the crops of interest, the laser beam shall be directly aimed at the weed root. Yet, weed stem detection remains an under-explored problem. We integrate the detection of crop and weed with the localization of weed stem into one end-to-end system. To train and validate the proposed system in a real-life scenario, we curate and construct a high-quality weed stem detection dataset with human annotations. The dataset consists of 7,161 high-resolution pictures collected in the field with annotations of 11,151 instances of weed. Experimental results show that the proposed system improves weeding accuracy by 6.7% and reduces energy cost by 32.3% compared to existing weed recognition systems.