Beyond AI as Assistants: Toward Autonomous Discovery in Cosmology
For cosmologists, this work demonstrates AI agents moving beyond assistants toward autonomous discovery, though the results are preliminary demonstrations.
The paper introduces two AI agent systems for cosmology: CMBEvolve improves out-of-distribution detection in weak-lensing maps via code evolution, and CosmoEvolve autonomously analyzes ACT DR6 data, identifying non-trivial behavior and producing analysis-grade diagnostics.
Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) agents are pushing AI beyond tools toward autonomous scientific discovery. We discuss two complementary agentic systems for cosmology: \texttt{CMBEvolve}, which targets tasks with explicit quantitative objectives through LLM-guided code evolution and tree search, and \texttt{CosmoEvolve}, which targets open-ended scientific workflows through a virtual multi-agent research laboratory. As preliminary demonstrations, we apply \texttt{CMBEvolve} to out-of-distribution detection in weak-lensing maps, where it iteratively improves the benchmark score through code evolution, and \texttt{CosmoEvolve} to autonomous ACT DR6 data analysis, where it identifies non-trivial pair- and scale-dependent behaviour and produces analysis-grade diagnostics. These examples show how cosmology can provide both controlled benchmark tasks and realistic open-ended research problems for the development of AI scientist systems.