Agentic Discovery with Active Hypothesis Exploration for Visual Recognition

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Koo, Jaywon, Hernandez, Jefferson, He, Ruozhen, Chen, Hanjie, Wei, Chen, Ordonez, Vicente
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Koo, Jaywon
Hernandez, Jefferson
He, Ruozhen
Chen, Hanjie
Wei, Chen
Ordonez, Vicente
author_facet Koo, Jaywon
Hernandez, Jefferson
He, Ruozhen
Chen, Hanjie
Wei, Chen
Ordonez, Vicente
contents We introduce HypoExplore, an agentic framework that formulates neural architecture discovery for visual recognition as a hypothesis-driven scientific inquiry. Given a human-specified high-level research direction, HypoExplore ideates, implements, evaluates, and improves neural architectures through evolutionary branching. New hypotheses are created using a large language model by selecting a parent hypothesis to build upon, guided by a dual strategy that balances exploiting validated principles with resolving uncertain ones. Our proposed framework maintains a Trajectory Tree that records the lineage of all proposed architectures, and a Hypothesis Memory Bank that actively tracks confidence scores acquired through experimental evidence. After each experiment, multiple feedback agents analyze the results from different perspectives and consolidate their findings into hypothesis confidence updates. Our framework is tested on discovering lightweight vision architectures on CIFAR-10, with the best achieving 94.11% accuracy evolved from a root node baseline that starts at 18.91%, and generalizes to CIFAR-100 and Tiny-ImageNet. We further demonstrate applicability to a specialized domain by conducting independent architecture discovery runs on MedMNIST, which yield a state-of-the-art performance. We show that hypothesis confidence scores grow increasingly predictive as evidence accumulates, and that the learned principles transfer across independent evolutionary lineages, suggesting that HypoExplore not only discovers stronger architectures, but can help build a genuine understanding of the design space.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_12999
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Agentic Discovery with Active Hypothesis Exploration for Visual Recognition
Koo, Jaywon
Hernandez, Jefferson
He, Ruozhen
Chen, Hanjie
Wei, Chen
Ordonez, Vicente
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
We introduce HypoExplore, an agentic framework that formulates neural architecture discovery for visual recognition as a hypothesis-driven scientific inquiry. Given a human-specified high-level research direction, HypoExplore ideates, implements, evaluates, and improves neural architectures through evolutionary branching. New hypotheses are created using a large language model by selecting a parent hypothesis to build upon, guided by a dual strategy that balances exploiting validated principles with resolving uncertain ones. Our proposed framework maintains a Trajectory Tree that records the lineage of all proposed architectures, and a Hypothesis Memory Bank that actively tracks confidence scores acquired through experimental evidence. After each experiment, multiple feedback agents analyze the results from different perspectives and consolidate their findings into hypothesis confidence updates. Our framework is tested on discovering lightweight vision architectures on CIFAR-10, with the best achieving 94.11% accuracy evolved from a root node baseline that starts at 18.91%, and generalizes to CIFAR-100 and Tiny-ImageNet. We further demonstrate applicability to a specialized domain by conducting independent architecture discovery runs on MedMNIST, which yield a state-of-the-art performance. We show that hypothesis confidence scores grow increasingly predictive as evidence accumulates, and that the learned principles transfer across independent evolutionary lineages, suggesting that HypoExplore not only discovers stronger architectures, but can help build a genuine understanding of the design space.
title Agentic Discovery with Active Hypothesis Exploration for Visual Recognition
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.12999