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arXiv · 2609.17523

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

Shuhan Xue·Jianyuan Zhong·Ziyuan Nan·Wenbin Li·Zhaochen Yu·Jinchao Ding·Qiang Gao·Pengyu Zhan·Yuntong Zhang·Tian Cheng·Zhenfei Yin·Yingcheng Wu·Ling Yang
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Abstract

We introduce and release ScienceBuddy, an interactive scientific research workspace that brings continually improving scientific agents into researchers' everyday workflows. ScienceBuddy supports researchers in carrying out scientific tasks while transforming their requests, feedback, and execution evidence into tasks and evaluation rubrics for continual learning. At its core is recursive-in-recursive self-improvement, a paradigm that couples harness evolution with model reinforcement learning: the inner recursion improves the harness with the model fixed, while the outer recursion trains the model under the improved harness. Harness evolution shapes training experience, and model learning creates new opportunities for harness adaptation. We present case studies of researcher interaction, harness refinement, and model learning, with the benchmark cases spanning four scientific task families. By releasing ScienceBuddy as a research product, we make this paradigm available to the scientific community and take a step toward discovery intelligence: scientific AI that advances through sustained collaboration with researchers and evolves alongside the research it supports. Website: http://science-buddy.io

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Shuhan Xue, Jianyuan Zhong, Ziyuan Nan, Wenbin Li, Zhaochen Yu, Jinchao Ding, Qiang Gao, Pengyu Zhan, Yuntong Zhang, Tian Cheng, Zhenfei Yin, Yingcheng Wu, Ling Yang. 2026-09-15. ScienceBuddy: Recursive-in-Recursive Self-Improvement for Interactive Scientific Agents. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.17523

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