DISCOVERYWORLD: A Virtual Environment for Developing and Evaluating Automated Scientific Discovery Agents

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Jansen, Peter, Côté, Marc-Alexandre, Khot, Tushar, Bransom, Erin, Mishra, Bhavana Dalvi, Majumder, Bodhisattwa Prasad, Tafjord, Oyvind, Clark, Peter
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Jansen, Peter
Côté, Marc-Alexandre
Khot, Tushar
Bransom, Erin
Mishra, Bhavana Dalvi
Majumder, Bodhisattwa Prasad
Tafjord, Oyvind
Clark, Peter
author_facet Jansen, Peter
Côté, Marc-Alexandre
Khot, Tushar
Bransom, Erin
Mishra, Bhavana Dalvi
Majumder, Bodhisattwa Prasad
Tafjord, Oyvind
Clark, Peter
contents Automated scientific discovery promises to accelerate progress across scientific domains. However, developing and evaluating an AI agent's capacity for end-to-end scientific reasoning is challenging as running real-world experiments is often prohibitively expensive or infeasible. In this work we introduce DISCOVERYWORLD, the first virtual environment for developing and benchmarking an agent's ability to perform complete cycles of novel scientific discovery. DISCOVERYWORLD contains a variety of different challenges, covering topics as diverse as radioisotope dating, rocket science, and proteomics, to encourage development of general discovery skills rather than task-specific solutions. DISCOVERYWORLD itself is an inexpensive, simulated, text-based environment (with optional 2D visual overlay). It includes 120 different challenge tasks, spanning eight topics each with three levels of difficulty and several parametric variations. Each task requires an agent to form hypotheses, design and run experiments, analyze results, and act on conclusions. DISCOVERYWORLD further provides three automatic metrics for evaluating performance, based on (a) task completion, (b) task-relevant actions taken, and (c) the discovered explanatory knowledge. We find that strong baseline agents, that perform well in prior published environments, struggle on most DISCOVERYWORLD tasks, suggesting that DISCOVERYWORLD captures some of the novel challenges of discovery, and thus that DISCOVERYWORLD may help accelerate near-term development and assessment of scientific discovery competency in agents. Code available at: www.github.com/allenai/discoveryworld
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_06769
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle DISCOVERYWORLD: A Virtual Environment for Developing and Evaluating Automated Scientific Discovery Agents
Jansen, Peter
Côté, Marc-Alexandre
Khot, Tushar
Bransom, Erin
Mishra, Bhavana Dalvi
Majumder, Bodhisattwa Prasad
Tafjord, Oyvind
Clark, Peter
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Automated scientific discovery promises to accelerate progress across scientific domains. However, developing and evaluating an AI agent's capacity for end-to-end scientific reasoning is challenging as running real-world experiments is often prohibitively expensive or infeasible. In this work we introduce DISCOVERYWORLD, the first virtual environment for developing and benchmarking an agent's ability to perform complete cycles of novel scientific discovery. DISCOVERYWORLD contains a variety of different challenges, covering topics as diverse as radioisotope dating, rocket science, and proteomics, to encourage development of general discovery skills rather than task-specific solutions. DISCOVERYWORLD itself is an inexpensive, simulated, text-based environment (with optional 2D visual overlay). It includes 120 different challenge tasks, spanning eight topics each with three levels of difficulty and several parametric variations. Each task requires an agent to form hypotheses, design and run experiments, analyze results, and act on conclusions. DISCOVERYWORLD further provides three automatic metrics for evaluating performance, based on (a) task completion, (b) task-relevant actions taken, and (c) the discovered explanatory knowledge. We find that strong baseline agents, that perform well in prior published environments, struggle on most DISCOVERYWORLD tasks, suggesting that DISCOVERYWORLD captures some of the novel challenges of discovery, and thus that DISCOVERYWORLD may help accelerate near-term development and assessment of scientific discovery competency in agents. Code available at: www.github.com/allenai/discoveryworld
title DISCOVERYWORLD: A Virtual Environment for Developing and Evaluating Automated Scientific Discovery Agents
topic Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.06769