Bixuan Li

Peng Kang, Bixuan Li, Xiaoya Huang et al.

The Materials Genome Initiative catalyzed the proliferation of centralized platforms--SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS--that aggregate computational and experimental resources for accelerated materials discovery. In parallel, breakthroughs in large language models (LLMs) and autonomous agents have created powerful new reasoning capabilities for scientific research. Yet a critical "last mile" problem remains: while we possess world-class models and vast repositories of materials data, we lack the organizational infrastructure to compose these capabilities securely across institutional boundaries. The development of structural and functional materials for harsh service environments--high-temperature alloys, radiation resistant steels, corrosion-resistant coatings--remains characterized by long-term iteration, mechanistic complexity, and high domain expertise--demands that exceed both monolithic agent systems and traditional centralized platforms. To address this gap we propose OpenAaaS, an open-source hierarchical and distributed Agent-as-a-Service framework that enables organized multi-agent collaboration for intelligent materials design. OpenAaaS is built on a single foundational principle: code flows, data stays still. A Master Agent plans and decomposes complex research tasks without requiring direct access to subordinate agents' managed data and computational resources. Sub-agents, deployed as near-data execution nodes, retain full sovereignty over local datasets, proprietary algorithms, and specialized hardware. This architecture guarantees that raw data never leaves its domain of origin while enabling cross-scale, cross-domain secure integration of previously isolated materials intelligence silos. We validate the framework through two representative case studies: (i) AlphaAgent, an evidence-grounded materials literature analysis executor that achieves 4.66/5.0 on deep analytical questions against single-pass RAG baselines; and (ii) an ultra-large-scale hexa-high-entropy alloy descriptor database service that demonstrates secure near-data execution and domain-specific scientific workflows under strict data-sovereignty constraints. OpenAaaS establishes a principled pathway toward "organized research" via agent collectives, offering a scalable foundation for next-generation materials intelligent design platforms. All source code is available at https://github.com/Wolido/OpenAaaS.

Bixuan Li, Yu Liu, Shuo Shi et al.

Materials science literature analysis requires simultaneous attention to composition, processing, characterization, and property relationships, yet conventional retrieval-augmented generation pipelines struggle to reconcile heterogeneous tasks within a single retrieve-then-generate architecture. Here we present AlphaAgent, a skill-driven agent framework that decouples retrieval-based question answering from paper-level report generation through explicit skill contracts. A dedicated retrieval skill rewrites user requests into material-specific search intents, queries a curated index of more than 300,000 papers from the Journal Citation Reports Metallurgy and Metallurgical Engineering category, and reformulates queries when initial evidence is insufficient. A separate report-generation skill parses full-text PDFs to produce structured per-paper analytical reports and cross-paper summaries. In a blind evaluation on 40 materials-science questions, half of which required deep analytical reasoning, AlphaAgent substantially outperformed a baseline system matched for underlying model, document index, and retrieval scale, with the largest gains in mechanistic explanation and awareness of credibility boundaries. These results indicate that explicit task separation, refined retrieval intent, and evidence-aware generation improve large-language-model-based literature analysis for materials research.