End-to-end autonomous scientific discovery on a real optical platform

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2604.27092v1
• Date: Wed, 29 Apr 2026 18:36:57 GMT
• Title: End-to-end autonomous scientific discovery on a real optical platform
• Abstract summary: Qiushi Discovery Engine is an LLM-based agentic system for end-to-end autonomous scientific discovery on a real optical platform.<n>It reproduces a published transmission-matrix experiment on a non-original platform and converts an abstract coherence-order theory into experimental observables.<n>This is the first demonstration of an AI agentic system autonomously identifying and experimentally validating a nontrivial, previously unreported physical mechanism.
• Score: 12.355486051983162
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Scientific research has long been human-led, driving new knowledge and transformative technologies through the continual revision of questions, methods and claims as evidence accumulates. Although large language model (LLM)-based agents are beginning to move beyond assisting predefined research workflows, none has yet demonstrated end-to-end autonomous discovery in a real physical system that produces a nontrivial result supported by experimental evidence. Here we introduce Qiushi Discovery Engine, an LLM-based agentic system for end-to-end autonomous scientific discovery on a real optical platform. Qiushi Engine combines nonlinear research phases, Meta-Trace memory and a dual-layer architecture to maintain adaptive and stable research trajectories across long-horizon investigations involving thousands of LLM-mediated reasoning, measurement and revision actions. It autonomously reproduces a published transmission-matrix experiment on a non-original platform and converts an abstract coherence-order theory into experimental observables, providing, to our knowledge, the first observation of this class of coherence-order structure. More importantly, in an open-ended study involving 145.9 million tokens, 3,242 LLM calls, 1,242 tool calls, 163 research notes and 44 scripts, Qiushi Engine proposes and experimentally validates optical bilinear interaction, a physical mechanism structurally analogous to a core operation in Transformer attention. This AI-discovered mechanism suggests a route towards high-speed, energy-efficient optical hardware for pairwise computation. To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of an AI agentic system autonomously identifying and experimentally validating a nontrivial, previously unreported physical mechanism, marking a milestone for research-level autonomous agents.

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