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arXiv · 2610.38882

Aligning Autoresearch: Co-Improvement between Agents and Humans

Tianjian Li·Chuanyang Jin·Seungone Kim·Tong Chen·John Hoffman·Yoram Bachrach amd Pedro Rodriguez·Ping Yu·Eryk Helenowski·Swarnadeep Saha·Jack Lanchantin·Weizhe Yuan·Ilia Kulikov·Jason Weston
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Abstract

Autoresearch agents can now attempt long-horizon AI research end-to-end, i.e., self-improvement. However, best results are still obtained by research agents interacting with human researchers, and improving AI's ability to perform this co-research will only reinforce this effect---a process termed co-improvement (Weston and Foerster, 2025). Further, aligning with human expectations is likely a safer path for research agents, especially given recent agent reward hacking phenomena (OpenAI, 2026b). In this work we address these issues in four ways: (i) we empirically study the role of humans in directing autoresearch agents, focusing on the domain of benchmark creation, and find humans still play a pivotal role particularly in the ideation phase; (ii) we also develop a benchmark, HackBench, that shows current autoresearch agents are not aligned and are unable to achieve hack localization sufficiently; (iii) we present a method to train agents for improved human interaction by using human simulators as a proxy during reinforcement learning (RL); and finally (iv) we develop a method to improve model text generation, and hence agent communication, by RL with rubrics aligned with human experts. Together, our training and evaluation recipes provide a path toward more capable and aligned (co-)research agents.

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Tianjian Li, Chuanyang Jin, Seungone Kim, Tong Chen, John Hoffman, Yoram Bachrach amd Pedro Rodriguez, Ping Yu, Eryk Helenowski, Swarnadeep Saha, Jack Lanchantin, Weizhe Yuan, Ilia Kulikov, Jason Weston. 2026-10-28. Aligning Autoresearch: Co-Improvement between Agents and Humans. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.38882

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