Grounded autonomous research: a fault-tolerant LLM pipeline from corpus to manuscript in frontier computational physics
For researchers in frontier physical sciences, this work demonstrates a path toward autonomous research agents that can produce verifiable results, addressing the challenge of hallucination in unstructured scientific domains.
The paper presents an LLM-based pipeline that autonomously produces a publication-grade manuscript in condensed-matter physics, starting from a corpus of 11,083 arXiv papers and yielding three novel findings on altermagnetic piezomagnetism. The pipeline achieves fault tolerance through redundancy and adversarial review, with bounded human intervention only at reproduction failures.
Autonomous-research agents have demonstrated end-to-end LLM automation in machine-learning sandboxes where execution provides calibration. Frontier physical science differs categorically: physical reasoning underlies every methodology choice, toolchains are often underdocumented, and calibration must come from external literature anchors - which unscaffolded agents cite but do not confront, hallucinating plausible, unverifiable results from internal priors. We present a pipeline that runs end-to-end from a corpus of 11,083 recent condensed-matter physics arXiv papers to a publication-grade manuscript with three substantive physics findings (here on altermagnetic piezomagnetism): the agent autonomously conceives a research direction by mapping the corpus, calibrates methodology by reproducing published references, conducts novel first-principles computations, and writes the manuscript - grounded in literature throughout, across 47 fresh-context sessions in six phases sharing only on-disk state, with 2,162 literature-consultation events. Fault tolerance emerges from redundancy: fresh-context isolation, distributed grounding, and adversarial review catch what any single session misses; pre- and post-pilot stages are fully autonomous, and pilot requires bounded human intervention only at reproduction failures - operational knowledge curation, not scientific direction. Two paired failure modes - a pre-architecture baseline and a no-pilot ablation - isolate structurally enforced numerical confrontation at calibration checkpoints as the operative grounding mechanism. The primitives, characterized failure modes, and quantified intervention pattern lay a foundation for autonomous research in high-stakes scientific domains beyond computational physics.