Paper Detail

OmniScientist: An Omni-Modal Omni-Discipline AI Scientist

Bobo Li, Hao Fei, Tianjie Ju, Mong-Li Lee, Wynne Hsu

arxiv Score 13.8

Published 2026-08-13 · First seen 2026-08-14

General AI

Abstract

Recent advances in foundation models have enabled AI scientists to automate increasingly complete research workflows, from hypothesis generation and code execution to manuscript preparation. Yet workflow coverage alone does not provide access to the full evidence on which scientific discovery depends. Existing systems typically reason over text, code, labels, or precomputed summaries, leaving scientifically decisive spatial, temporal, cross-channel, and procedural relations unavailable to the agent. We introduce OmniScientist, an end-to-end, omni-modal AI scientist that conducts multidisciplinary research directly from heterogeneous raw evidence. A perception layer and 3 autonomous agents for ideation, experiment, and writeup operate within a deterministic pipeline, allowing observations to shape research questions, experimental decisions, and final claims throughout the research lifecycle. By running idea, rigour, and claim checks in code, the system enforces novelty screening, statistical validity, execution provenance, and numerical traceability. We evaluate OmniScientist on 36 real-data cases spanning 5 discipline families, 4 families of scientific evidence, and modalities including images, signals, audio, video, 3-D structures, trajectories, tables, formulae, and graphs. The system completes the full path from raw data to a compiled manuscript in all 36 cases and achieves a mean overall paper score of 6.3 with the reference reasoning backbone. In paired comparisons against a blind variant that receives only precomputed scalar features, direct perception improves all 7 evaluation dimensions and wins 85% of head-to-head judgments. These results show that lifecycle-wide perception is essential for evidence-grounded scientific discovery and provides a practical path toward broadly capable AI scientists.

Workflow Status

Review status
pending
Role
unreviewed
Read priority
now
Vote
Not set.
Saved
no
Collections
Not filed yet.
Next action
Not filled yet.

Reading Brief

No structured notes yet. Add `summary_sections`, `why_relevant`, `claim_impact`, or `next_action` in `papers.jsonl` to enrich this view.

Why It Surfaced

No ranking explanation is available yet.

Tags

No tags.

BibTeX

@article{li2026omniscientist,
  title = {OmniScientist: An Omni-Modal Omni-Discipline AI Scientist},
  author = {Bobo Li and Hao Fei and Tianjie Ju and Mong-Li Lee and Wynne Hsu},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Recent advances in foundation models have enabled AI scientists to automate increasingly complete research workflows, from hypothesis generation and code execution to manuscript preparation. Yet workflow coverage alone does not provide access to the full evidence on which scientific discovery depends. Existing systems typically reason over text, code, labels, or precomputed summaries, leaving scientifically decisive spatial, temporal, cross-channel, and procedural relations unavailable to the ag},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13558},
  keywords = {cs.AI, cs.CL, Computer science, Novelty, Workflow, Scientific discovery, Artificial intelligence},
  eprint = {2608.13558},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

Metadata

{}