Skip to content

SAIL: Scientific Agentic Intelligence via a Science-Aware Loop

Oct 2026 · 0 citations
Computer Science

TL;DR

This work introduces SAIL, an open model with 35B total and 3B active parameters for literature research, scientific coding, and multi-step research workflows that achieves competitive performance across scientific research tasks with substantially fewer parameters than leading open-weight models.

Abstract

We introduce SAIL, an open model with 35B total and 3B active parameters for literature research, scientific coding, and multi-step research workflows. SAIL is developed through a science-aware improvement loop: agents built on frontier AI models analyze its task failures and construct training tasks that address the underlying capability gaps. The diagnosis examines search and evidence selection in literature tasks, scientific assumptions and reasoning in coding, and planning and revision in longer investigations. The agents draw on paper collections and scientific code repositories to build problems, interaction trajectories, and executable tasks with the required environments and tools. We repeat this loop over multiple development cycles and train SAIL through supervised fine-tuning, specialist training, multi-teacher on-policy distillation, and agentic reinforcement learning. SAIL achieves competitive performance across scientific research tasks with substantially fewer parameters than leading open-weight models.

View source

Similar papers

Review Sep 2026

AI Agent Swarms as Researchers: Progress, Challenges, and Open Questions

Artificial intelligence (AI) agents, language models connected to tools and run in a loop, can now carry out long, multi-step tasks with little supervision. We gave swarms of off-the-shelf coding agents a short statement of scope, from a narrow topic to a whole field, access to the literature and to computing tools, an...

Sergey Gusev, David E. Bernal Neira · 0 citations

ScienceBuddy: Recursive-in-Recursive Self-Improvement for Interactive Scientific Agents

This work introduces and releases ScienceBuddy, an interactive scientific research workspace that brings continually improving scientific agents into researchers'everyday workflows and presents case studies of researcher interaction, harness refinement, and model learning, with the benchmark cases spanning four scienti...

Shu-Han Xue, Jian-Yuan Zhong, Zi-Yuan Nan et al. · 11 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

AutoSciBench: Autonomous Benchmark Generation for Evaluating Scientific Agents

As agents rapidly evolve, existing benchmarks can become saturated, limiting their ability to distinguish capabilities and reveal remaining failure modes. Particularly in scientific domains, constructing and updating benchmarks requires substantial time, labor, and domain expertise, making it difficult to keep evaluati...

Dongki Kim, Namkyeong Lee, Surag Nair et al. · 0 citations

ScienceIDE: Turning World's Scientific Codebase into Agent Learnable Environments

The model family shows gains in held-out scientific-code repair and across selected general-purpose benchmarks in code, reasoning, and knowledge, providing evidence of positive transfer from scientific experience to broader capabilities.

He-Jia Geng, Ze-Sen Huang, Hao-Yang Li et al. · 7 citations
Sep 2026

RACaP: Agentic Reasoning, Acting, and Coding as Policies for Evolvable Robot Learning

RACaP is introduced, an agentic framework that moves coding to evolution and uses a Reasoning-and-Acting loop to call frozen, typed Policy APIs at deployment and shows that separating reusable code from runtime decisions supports continued evolution, effective transfer, and efficient long-horizon control.

Ze-Xi Li, Ye-Hang Zhang, Hao-Jian Huang et al. · 5 citations · ⚡1

AIM: Agentic Idea Management for Automated Research

It is shown that explicit idea-level allocation makes semantic coverage directly controllable, and that broader coverage becomes increasingly valuable when competitive research directions are sparse among many plausible alternatives.

Hyeong Kyu Choi, Bhavana Dalvi, Jie-Feng Chen et al. · 2 citations · ⚡1

Related blog posts

Microsoft Research Blog Oct 22, 2026

Flint-interactive: A language for creating interactive data visualizations

Flint-interactive gives AI agents a language for creating interactive visualizations. Click a chart, filter data, highlight related content, and explore beyond the view the author originally chose. The post Flint-interactive: A language for creating interactive data visualizations appeared first on Microsoft Research.

We use cookies to run the site and, with your consent, for analytics and to show ads. See our Cookie Policy.