Adithya Srinivasan | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

Search Discipline for Long-Horizon Research Agents

Autoresearch agents now propose, evaluate, and select scientific candidates against a metric, and that metric is usually an aggregate reduced over a heterogeneous space of regions, slices, or cohorts. We show that when scientific validity lives in that disaggregated structure, the aggregate can rank the wrong candidate first. The headline number improves while the structure underneath inverts, so a decision made on the number accepts a candidate that quietly breaks the model. The failure is not domain-specific. It appears wherever a candidate's validity is multi-dimensional but its verifier is a single reduction. We demonstrate the inversion on a fire-model task in the Ecosystem Demography model. The highest-scoring candidate and a slightly lower one are within noise of each other on global score, yet the top-scoring one collapses the protected boreal regions while the other preserves them. What separates them is the per-region behavior, not the headline number. This decision should not be left to the agent that produced the candidates. The agent optimizing the score is the last party likely to catch the score being wrong, and a prompt has no remaining turn once the agent has stopped. We move the decision to an external control loop that audits each candidate on its disaggregated behavior and acts after the agent has decided. It can demote a candidate the agent would have accepted, and it can reopen a run the agent had declared finished. Our contribution is the inversion finding itself, and a search-discipline protocol that decides on reviewable candidate-effect evidence instead of the score.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

ALL-FEM: Agentic Large Language models Fine-tuned for Finite Element Methods

Finite element (FE) analysis guides the design and verification of nearly all manufactured objects. It is at the core of computational engineering, enabling simulation of complex physical systems, from fluids and solids to multiphysics systems. However, implementing FE codes and analyzing simulation results demands expertise across numerical analysis, continuum mechanics, and programming. Conventional Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate FE code, but they hallucinate, lack awareness of variational structures, and cannot close the loop from problem statement to a verified solution. Here, we propose ALL-FEM, an autonomous simulation system that integrates agentic AI with domain-specific, fine-tuned LLMs for FEniCS code generation across solid, fluid, and multiphysics applications. We construct a corpus of 1000+ verified FEniCS scripts by combining 500+ curated expert codes with a retrieval-augmented, multi-LLM pipeline that generates and filters codes for diverse PDEs, geometries, and boundary conditions. We used the corpus to fine-tune LLMs with 3B to 120B parameters. Our agentic framework orchestrates specialized agents, powered by fine-tuned LLMs, to formulate problems as PDEs, generate and debug code and visualize the results. We evaluated the system on 39 benchmarks that include problems of linear/nonlinear elasticity, plasticity, Newtonian/non-Newtonian flow, thermofluids, fluid-structure interaction, phase separation, and transport on moving domains. Embedded in a multi-agent workflow with runtime feedback, the best fine-tuned model (GPT OSS 120B) achieves code-level success of 71.79%, outperforming a non-agentic deployment of GPT 5 Thinking. By showing that relatively small, fine-tuned LLMs, orchestrated through agentic frameworks, can automate FE workflows, ALL-FEM offers a blueprint for autonomous simulation systems in computational science and engineering.

cs.CE↗