Technology for scientific discovery

Papers·4 in total

1. 15 Sep 2026Foundation Models

   Discovery Foundation Models: Toward Open-Ended Discovery Intelligence

   Ling Yang, Zhenfei Yin, Yingcheng Wu

   Foundation models have progressed from learning and reasoning over existing knowledge, to increasingly learning through action, tool use, and outcome feedback. We argue that the next frontier is a further transition: from solving and acting within problems specified by humans to participating in the process by which new problems, representations, explanations, and knowledge are created. We refer to this capability as Discovery Intelligence. We formulate Discovery Foundation Models (DFMs) as general-purpose model systems for open-ended discovery. A DFM operates over a revisable research state and supports seven coupled capabilities spanning problem discovery, formulation, representation construction, hypothesis formation, intervention, evidence-grounded revision, and continual discovery improvement. We instantiate this framework with Zetema, which couples explicit research-state dynamics, verification and experimental gating, external grounding, and cross-task Discovery Skill evolution. We further ground the framework with GALILEO, a real therapeutic-discovery system in which Dry-Lab reasoning, robotic and hands-on Wet-Lab experimentation, external biological evidence, and iterative hypothesis and design revision form a closed physical discovery loop. We then formulate a unified approach to capability formation and process-centered evaluation, enabling discovery behavior to be trained, improved, and measured beyond final-answer performance. Together, these components establish discovery as a learnable, executable, and evaluable capability of foundation-model systems. We view this shift as a broader progression in intelligence scaling: from learning over existing knowledge, to learning from action outcomes, and ultimately to participating in the construction, testing, and revision of the structures through which new knowledge is discovered.

   PhAI Labs Technical Report

2. 16 Sep 2026Scientific Agents

   ScienceBuddy: Recursive-in-Recursive Self-Improvement for Interactive Scientific Agents

   Shuhan Xue*, Jianyuan Zhong*, Ziyuan Nan*, Wenbin Li, Zhaochen Yu, Jinchao Ding, Qiang Gao, Pengyu Zhan, Yuntong Zhang, Tian Cheng, Zhenfei Yin, Yingcheng Wu, Ling Yang

   ScienceBuddy is an interactive scientific research workspace that brings continually improving agents into a researcher's everyday work. It supports researchers in carrying out scientific tasks while turning their requests, feedback and execution evidence into tasks and evaluation rubrics for continual learning. At its core is recursive-in-recursive self-improvement, which couples harness evolution with model reinforcement learning: the inner recursion improves the harness with the model fixed, and the outer recursion trains the model under the improved harness. Case studies cover researcher interaction, harness refinement and model learning across four families of scientific task.

   PhAI Labs Technical Report

3. 17 Sep 2026Research Environments

   ScienceIDE: Turning World's Scientific Codebase into Agent Learnable Environments

   Hejia Geng*, Zesen Huang*, Haoyang Li, Wenbin Li, Koutian Wu, Zihan Zhou, Yuanbo Pang, Weihao Liu, Zigong Xu, Zhiping Li, Zongzheng Zhang, Chuanfei Dong, Jiankai Sun, Tianzhe Zheng, Fengyu Xie, Yue Ma, Yueheng Shi, Junkai Wang, Tong Xie, Zonglin Di, Xianrong Liu, Qucheng Gao, Yimin Liu, Jiaming Pan, Sheng Huang, Xiao-Han Ma, Lanqing Yuan, Zhenlin Zhu, Ziang Liu, Ziyang Xu, Kangkai Liang, Jiayi Xian, Zehong Zhao, Taigao Ma, Fuming Chang, Yuanzhe Hu, Liuwei Xu, Xianzhe Tang, Jingxu Xie, Peijin Zhang, Qiang Gao, Chengyi Xing, Zhe Zhao, Xi Wang, Leo Wang, Fang Wu, Yaopeng Xing, Xing Meng, Zhenfei Yin, Yingcheng Wu, Ling Yang

   Scientific code repositories encode decades of human knowledge in executable models, methods, and tools. Yet fragmented toolchains, implicit domain conventions, and specialized correctness criteria make this knowledge difficult to convert into reliable learning experience—a challenge we call the scientific experience bottleneck. We introduce ScienceIDE, infrastructure for turning the world’s scientific code into programmable environments for scientific agents. Guided by expert-defined scientific cases and acceptance criteria, agents transform repositories into executable environments that support task generation, execution, and scientific verification. These environments provide a shared foundation for supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, and evaluation. Using verified interaction trajectories, we train PhAI-IDE-72B, PhAI-IDE-9B, and PhAI-IDE-4B. The model family shows gains in held-out scientific-code repair and across selected general-purpose benchmarks in code, reasoning, and knowledge, providing evidence of positive transfer from scientific experience to broader capabilities. ScienceIDE lays the foundation for an integrated workspace for agent learning and scientific practice, making humanity’s scientific software a shared substrate for developing scientific intelligence.

   PhAI Labs Technical Report

4. 18 Sep 2026World Models

   JEPA-Anything: Learning Predictive Models across Different Worlds

   Taoyong Cui, Zhongyao Wang, Xinyue Xu, Weiyang Liu, Zhaochen Yu, Yuying Zhang, Qiang Gao, Mengyue Yang, Wanli Ouyang, Pheng Ann Heng, Yingcheng Wu, Zhenfei Yin, Ling Yang

   World modeling enables intelligence to anticipate consequences, guide interventions, and learn from interaction. Yet predictive models remain domain-specific: can a common learning principle support world modeling across radically different systems? We introduce JEPA-Anything, a domain-agnostic framework based on orthogonal predictive factorization (OPF). Extending joint-embedding predictive architectures, OPF decomposes latent targets into complementary factors, learns them through dedicated pathways, and recombines them within a shared predictive design. We evaluate JEPA-Anything across seven domains: vision, biology, clinical trajectories, control, molecular dynamics, physical fields, and weather. Experiments span representation learning, intervention prediction, out-of-distribution generalization, and long-horizon dynamics, including 10 matched dynamics tasks, forecasting of over 1,000 clinical events, and 100-step molecular rollouts across four systems. Against matched JEPA baselines, JEPA-Anything improves reported metrics on all 10 dynamics tasks and reduces single-intervention prediction error on Interventional Pong by 34.8%. It achieves the lowest one-step and 100-step molecular errors among compared methods in all four systems. Beyond prediction, a factor-nominated biological intervention receives experimental support in cell co-cultures, patient-derived organoids, tumor fragments, and mice; latent orbital modes recover the Keplerian scaling exponent with a fitted slope of −1.4991. These results support a common factorized predictive principle across heterogeneous worlds, connecting world modeling with intervention and experimentally grounded scientific discovery.

   PhAI Labs Technical Report