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An AI system to help scientists write expert-level empirical software

Paper · 2025 · Eser Aygün, Anastasiya Belyaeva, Gheorghe Comanici et al.

Summary

Software for computational experiments that must maximize a measurable score is slow to build by hand, and researchers seldom test alternative designs systematically. The authors, from Google DeepMind and Google Research, present Empirical Research Assistance (ERA). It treats such problems as scorable tasks. An LLM (Gemini) repeatedly rewrites candidate programs, each candidate is run and scored in a sandbox, and a tree search decides which candidates to develop further by trading off exploration against exploitation. Prompts can be enriched with research ideas, such as LLM-written summaries of papers, textbook knowledge, search-engine results or Deep Research output, and successful ideas can be recombined. The system was developed on Kaggle playground competitions. It was then tested on six scientific benchmarks: scRNA-seq batch integration, CDC COVID-19 hospitalization forecasting, GIFT-Eval time series forecasting, satellite-image segmentation, ZAPBench zebrafish neural activity prediction, and difficult numerical integrals. ERA matched or exceeded expert-built solutions across these tasks. This suggests that large-scale automated search over code could substantially speed up empirical research.

Key points

  • Kaggle benchmark: ERA was evaluated on 16 playground competitions from the 2023 season, scored by public-leaderboard percentile.
    • Tree search beat a single LLM call, best-of-1000 sampling and AIDE.
    • Adding expert Kaggle advice, or asking ERA to write a boosted decision tree from scratch, improved results further.
  • scRNA-seq batch integration (OpenProblems v2.0.0): ERA found 40 novel methods that surpassed the top human-developed entries.
    • When given Gemini 2.5 Pro summaries of published methods, it beat the published results for 8 of 9 methods.
    • Its BBKNN (TS) implementation scored 14% higher overall than the best published method (ComBat).
    • Optimization used a separate dataset, and evaluation used holdout data of about 1.75M cells across 13 metrics.
  • COVID-19 forecasting: ERA generated 14 models, each of which beat both the CDC's ensemble forecast and all of the individual models.
  • GIFT-Eval time series forecasting: ERA ran 300-node searches separately for 92 of 97 datasets.
    • It also built a unified library restricted to numpy, pandas and holidays, using more than 1,000 search nodes and eight preset configurations.
    • The unified library's MASE improved from 0.82 to 0.77 and finally to 0.734, measured against the May 18, 2025 leaderboard snapshot.
  • Code adherence: Expert review found that nearly all generated implementations followed the requested algorithms. ERA also implemented TabVI, which has no public code.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

 Fields, topics and concepts

Cite

Cite as Eser Aygün, Anastasiya Belyaeva, Gheorghe Comanici, Marc Coram, Hao Cui, Jake Garrison, Renee Johnston Anton Kast, Cory Y. McLean, Peter Norgaard, Zahra Shamsi, David Smalling, James Thompson, Subhashini Venugopalan, Brian P. Williams, Chujun He, Sarah Martinson, Martyna Plomecka, Lai Wei, Yuchen Zhou, Qian-Ze Zhu, Matthew Abraham, Erica Brand, Anna Bulanova, Jeffrey A. Cardille, Chris Co, Scott Ellsworth, Grace Joseph, Malcolm Kane, Ryan Krueger, Johan Kartiwa, Dan Liebling, Jan-Matthis Lueckmann, Paul Raccuglia, Xuefei (Julie) Wang, Katherine Chou, James Manyika, Yossi Matias, John C. Platt, Lizzie Dorfman, Shibl Mourad and Michael P. Brenner. 2025. An AI system to help scientists write expert-level empirical software. arXiv:2509.06503.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.48550/arxiv.2509.06503 · arXiv 2509.06503

@misc{aygun2025ai,
  title = {{An AI system to help scientists write expert-level empirical software}},
  author = {Eser Aygün, Anastasiya Belyaeva, Gheorghe Comanici, Marc Coram, Hao Cui, Jake Garrison, Renee Johnston Anton Kast, Cory Y. McLean, Peter Norgaard, Zahra Shamsi, David Smalling, James Thompson, Subhashini Venugopalan, Brian P. Williams, Chujun He, Sarah Martinson, Martyna Plomecka, Lai Wei, Yuchen Zhou, Qian-Ze Zhu, Matthew Abraham, Erica Brand, Anna Bulanova, Jeffrey A. Cardille, Chris Co, Scott Ellsworth, Grace Joseph, Malcolm Kane, Ryan Krueger, Johan Kartiwa, Dan Liebling, Jan-Matthis Lueckmann, Paul Raccuglia, Xuefei (Julie) Wang, Katherine Chou, James Manyika, Yossi Matias, John C. Platt, Lizzie Dorfman, Shibl Mourad and Michael P. Brenner},
  year = {2025},
  doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2509.06503},
  eprint = {2509.06503},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2509.06503}
}

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