Large Knowledge Model: A Knowledge Foundation for Agentic Science at Scale

Abstract

Agentic science envisions many autonomous agents investigating concurrently while building on a shared, evolving body of scientific knowledge. This requires a knowledge foundation that supports high-concurrency access, preserves traceable and reusable reasoning, and grows incrementally. We propose the Large Knowledge Model (LKM), a growing, agent-native knowledge foundation that provides a general representation of scientific knowledge across disciplines. LKM organizes the scientific literature into reasoning graphs, with claims as the core nodes and associated reasoning chains that make explicit how premises and evidence support conclusions. These source-grounded objects are persistent and addressable; cross-paper links organize them into aligned question, workflow, and evidence views. Newly extracted papers extend the foundation incrementally while preserving existing object identities. Building on this foundation, we develop an agent-native, reasoning-aware scientific retrieval system that retrieves claims together with their reasoning chains and sources, enabling agents to inspect and reuse the evidence underlying scientific conclusions. Across benchmarks, agents using LKM retrieve more evidence, cite more faithfully, and answer scientific questions more accurately: LKM nearly doubles the known supporting and contradicting evidence retrieved on SciFact-Open (818 versus 443 claim-paper pairs), reasoning graphs raise citation F1 on ScholarQABench by more than 5 points over the same retrieved papers, and LKM retrieval improves a fixed answering model by 9.3, 4.2, and 14.7 points over no retrieval on ChemBench, PubMedQA, and SciBench. LKM lays the foundation for a scientific ecosystem in which AI scientists not only recall accumulated knowledge but also extend it, returning new questions, workflows, and evidence to a memory that every subsequent investigation can build on.