Materials
Reasoning Models Sometimes Output Illegible Chains of Thought
Language models trained via outcome-based reinforcement learning (RL) to reason using chain-of-thought (CoT) have shown remarkable performance. Monitoring such a model's CoT may allow us to understand its intentions and detect potential malicious behavior. However, to be effective, this requires that CoTs are legible and faithful. We study CoT legibility across 14 reasoning models, finding that RL often causes reasoning to become illegible to both humans and AI monitors, with reasoning models (except Claude) generating illegible CoTs while returning to perfectly readable final answers. We show that models use illegible reasoning to reach correct answers (accuracy dropping by 53\% when forced to use only legible portions), yet find no correlation between legibility and performance when resampling - suggesting the relationship is more nuanced. We also find that legibility degrades on harder questions. We discuss potential hypotheses for these results, including steganography, training artifacts, and vestigial tokens. These results suggest that without explicit optimization for legibility, outcome-based RL naturally produces models with increasingly opaque reasoning processes, potentially undermining monitoring approaches.
The Denario project: Deep knowledge AI agents for scientific discovery
Villaescusa-Navarro, Francisco, Bolliet, Boris, Villanueva-Domingo, Pablo, Bayer, Adrian E., Acquah, Aidan, Amancharla, Chetana, Barzilay-Siegal, Almog, Bermejo, Pablo, Bilodeau, Camille, Ramรญrez, Pablo Cรกrdenas, Cranmer, Miles, Franรงa, Urbano L., Hahn, ChangHoon, Jiang, Yan-Fei, Jimenez, Raul, Lee, Jun-Young, Lerario, Antonio, Mamun, Osman, Meier, Thomas, Ojha, Anupam A., Protopapas, Pavlos, Roy, Shimanto, Spergel, David N., Tarancรณn-รlvarez, Pedro, Tiwari, Ujjwal, Viel, Matteo, Wadekar, Digvijay, Wang, Chi, Wang, Bonny Y., Xu, Licong, Yovel, Yossi, Yue, Shuwen, Zhou, Wen-Han, Zhu, Qiyao, Zou, Jiajun, Zubeldia, รรฑigo
We present Denario, an AI multi-agent system designed to serve as a scientific research assistant. Denario can perform many different tasks, such as generating ideas, checking the literature, developing research plans, writing and executing code, making plots, and drafting and reviewing a scientific paper. The system has a modular architecture, allowing it to handle specific tasks, such as generating an idea, or carrying out end-to-end scientific analysis using Cmbagent as a deep-research backend. In this work, we describe in detail Denario and its modules, and illustrate its capabilities by presenting multiple AI-generated papers generated by it in many different scientific disciplines such as astrophysics, biology, biophysics, biomedical informatics, chemistry, material science, mathematical physics, medicine, neuroscience and planetary science. Denario also excels at combining ideas from different disciplines, and we illustrate this by showing a paper that applies methods from quantum physics and machine learning to astrophysical data. We report the evaluations performed on these papers by domain experts, who provided both numerical scores and review-like feedback. We then highlight the strengths, weaknesses, and limitations of the current system. Finally, we discuss the ethical implications of AI-driven research and reflect on how such technology relates to the philosophy of science. We publicly release the code at https://github.com/AstroPilot-AI/Denario. A Denario demo can also be run directly on the web at https://huggingface.co/spaces/astropilot-ai/Denario, and the full app will be deployed on the cloud.
Towards a Generalizable AI for Materials Discovery: Validation through Immersion Coolant Screening
Kim, Hyunseung, Jeong, Dae-Woong, Park, Changyoung, Lee, Won-Ji, Lee, Ha-Eun, Lee, Ji-Hye, Hormazabal, Rodrigo, Ko, Sung Moon, Lee, Sumin, Yim, Soorin, Lee, Chanhui, Han, Sehui, Cha, Sang-Ho, Lim, Woohyung
Artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a powerful accelerator of materials discovery, yet most existing models remain problem-specific, requiring additional data collection and retraining for each new property. Here we introduce and validate GATE (Geometrically Aligned Transfer Encoder) -- a generalizable AI framework that jointly learns 34 physicochemical properties spanning thermal, electrical, mechanical, and optical domains. By aligning these properties within a shared geometric space, GATE captures cross-property correlations that reduce disjoint-property bias -- a key factor causing false positives in multi-criteria screening. To demonstrate its generalizable utility, GATE -- without any problem-specific model reconfiguration -- applied to the discovery of immersion cooling fluids for data centers, a stringent real-world challenge defined by the Open Compute Project (OCP). Screening billions of candidates, GATE identified 92,861 molecules as promising for practical deployment. Four were experimentally or literarily validated, showing strong agreement with wet-lab measurements and performance comparable to or exceeding a commercial coolant. These results establish GATE as a generalizable AI platform readily applicable across diverse materials discovery tasks.
LLMs Can Covertly Sandbag on Capability Evaluations Against Chain-of-Thought Monitoring
Li, Chloe, Phuong, Mary, Siegel, Noah Y.
Trustworthy evaluations of dangerous capabilities are increasingly crucial for determining whether an AI system is safe to deploy. One empirically demonstrated threat is sandbagging - the strategic underperformance on evaluations by AI models or their developers. A promising defense is to monitor a model's chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, as this could reveal its intentions and plans. In this work, we measure the ability of models to sandbag on dangerous capability evaluations against a CoT monitor by prompting them to sandbag while being either monitor-oblivious or monitor-aware. We show that both frontier models and small open-sourced models can covertly sandbag against CoT monitoring 0-shot without hints. However, they cannot yet do so reliably: they bypass the monitor 16-36% of the time when monitor-aware, conditioned on sandbagging successfully. We qualitatively analyzed the uncaught CoTs to understand why the monitor failed. We reveal a rich attack surface for CoT monitoring and contribute five covert sandbagging policies generated by models. These results inform potential failure modes of CoT monitoring and may help build more diverse sandbagging model organisms.
LSM-MS2: A Foundation Model Bridging Spectral Identification and Biological Interpretation
Asher, Gabriel, Shah, Devesh, Caudy, Amy A., Ferro, Luke, Amar, Lea, Costa, Ana S. H., Patton, Thomas, O'Connor, Niall, Campbell, Jennifer M., Geremia, Jack
A vast majority of mass spectrometry data remains uncharacterized, leaving much of its biological and chemical information untapped. Recent advances in machine learning have begun to address this gap, particularly for tasks such as spectral identification in tandem mass spectrometry data. Here, we present the latest generation of LSM-MS2, a large-scale deep learning foundation model trained on millions of spectra to learn a semantic chemical space. LSM-MS2 achieves state-of-the-art performance in spectral identification, improving on existing methods by 30% in accuracy of identifying challenging isomeric compounds, yielding 42% more correct identifications in complex biological samples, and maintaining robustness under low-concentration conditions. Furthermore, LSM-MS2 produces rich spectral embeddings that enable direct biological interpretation from minimal downstream data, successfully differentiating disease states and predicting clinical outcomes across diverse translational applications.
Process Integrated Computer Vision for Real-Time Failure Prediction in Steel Rolling Mill
Kurrey, Vaibhav, Pujari, Sivakalyan, Gupta, Gagan Raj
We present a long-term deployment study of a machine vision-based anomaly detection system for failure prediction in a steel rolling mill. The system integrates industrial cameras to monitor equipment operation, alignment, and hot bar motion in real time along the process line. Live video streams are processed on a centralized video server using deep learning models, enabling early prediction of equipment failures and process interruptions, thereby reducing unplanned breakdown costs. Server-based inference minimizes the computational load on industrial process control systems (PLCs), supporting scalable deployment across production lines with minimal additional resources. By jointly analyzing sensor data from data acquisition systems and visual inputs, the system identifies the location and probable root causes of failures, providing actionable insights for proactive maintenance. This integrated approach enhances operational reliability, productivity, and profitability in industrial manufacturing environments.
Linking Heterogeneous Data with Coordinated Agent Flows for Social Media Analysis
Chen, Shifu, Deng, Dazhen, Xu, Zhihong, Xu, Sijia, Peng, Tai-Quan, Wu, Yingcai
Social media platforms generate massive volumes of heterogeneous data, capturing user behaviors, textual content, temporal dynamics, and network structures. Analyzing such data is crucial for understanding phenomena such as opinion dynamics, community formation, and information diffusion. However, discovering insights from this complex landscape is exploratory, conceptually challenging, and requires expertise in social media mining and visualization. Existing automated approaches, though increasingly leveraging large language models (LLMs), remain largely confined to structured tabular data and cannot adequately address the heterogeneity of social media analysis. We present SIA (Social Insight Agents), an LLM agent system that links heterogeneous multi-modal data -- including raw inputs (e.g., text, network, and behavioral data), intermediate outputs, mined analytical results, and visualization artifacts -- through coordinated agent flows. Guided by a bottom-up taxonomy that connects insight types with suitable mining and visualization techniques, SIA enables agents to plan and execute coherent analysis strategies. To ensure multi-modal integration, it incorporates a data coordinator that unifies tabular, textual, and network data into a consistent flow. Its interactive interface provides a transparent workflow where users can trace, validate, and refine the agent's reasoning, supporting both adaptability and trustworthiness. Through expert-centered case studies and quantitative evaluation, we show that SIA effectively discovers diverse and meaningful insights from social media while supporting human-agent collaboration in complex analytical tasks.
Four thoughts from Bill Gates on climate tech
Why he thinks near-term targets can be a distraction, and what technologies he expects to power our future grid. Bill Gates doesn't shy away or pretend modesty when it comes to his stature in the climate world today. "Well, who's the biggest funder of climate innovation companies?" he asked a handful of journalists at a media roundtable event last week. "If there's someone else, I've never met them." The former Microsoft CEO has spent the last decade investing in climate technology through Breakthrough Energy, which he founded in 2015. Ahead of the UN climate meetings kicking off next week, Gates published a memo outlining what he thinks activists and negotiators should focus on and how he's thinking about the state of climate tech right now.
Artificial Intelligence for Direct Prediction of Molecular Dynamics Across Chemical Space
Molecular dynamics (MD) is a powerful tool for exploring the behavior of atomistic systems, but its reliance on sequential numerical integration limits simulation efficiency. We present a novel neural network architecture, MDtrajNet, and a pre-trained foundational model, MDtrajNet-1, that directly generates MD trajectories across chemical space, bypassing force calculations and integration. This approach accelerates simulations by up to two orders of magnitude compared to traditional MD, even those enhanced by machine-learning interatomic potentials. MDtrajNet combines equivariant neural networks with a transformer-based architecture to achieve strong accuracy and transferability in predicting long-time trajectories. Remarkably, the errors of the trajectories generated by MDtrajNet-1 for various known and unseen molecular systems are close to those of the conventional ab initio MD. The architecture's flexible design supports diverse application scenarios, including different statistical ensembles, boundary conditions, and interaction types. By overcoming the intrinsic speed barrier of conventional MD, MDtrajNet opens new frontiers in efficient and scalable atomistic simulations.
MLPrE -- A tool for preprocessing and exploratory data analysis prior to machine learning model construction
Maxwell, David S, Darkoh, Michael, Samudrala, Sidharth R, Chung, Caroline, Schmidt, Stephanie T, Al-Lazikani, Bissan
With the recent growth of Deep Learning for AI, there is a need for tools to meet the demand of data flowing into those models. In some cases, source data may exist in multiple formats, and therefore the source data must be investigated and properly engineered for a Machine Learning model or graph database. Overhead and lack of scalability with existing workflows limit integration within a larger processing pipeline such as Apache Airflow, driving the need for a robust, extensible, and lightweight tool to preprocess arbitrary datasets that scales with data type and size. To address this, we present Machine Learning Preprocessing and Exploratory Data Analysis, MLPrE, in which SparkDataFrames were utilized to hold data during processing and ensure scalability. A generalizable JSON input file format was utilized to describe stepwise changes to that DataFrame. Stages were implemented for input and output, filtering, basic statistics, feature engineering, and exploratory data analysis. A total of 69 stages were implemented into MLPrE, of which we highlight and demonstrate key stages using six diverse datasets. We further highlight MLPrE's ability to independently process multiple fields in flat files and recombine them, otherwise requiring an additional pipeline, using a UniProt glossary term dataset. Building on this advantage, we demonstrated the clustering stage with available wine quality data. Lastly, we demonstrate the preparation of data for a graph database in the final stages of MLPrE using phosphosite kinase data. Overall, our MLPrE tool offers a generalizable and scalable tool for preprocessing and early data analysis, filling a critical need for such a tool given the ever expanding use of machine learning. This tool serves to accelerate and simplify early stage development in larger workflows.