AI for Auto-Research: Roadmap & User Guide

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2605.18661v1
• Date: Mon, 18 May 2026 17:08:26 GMT
• Title: AI for Auto-Research: Roadmap & User Guide
• Abstract summary: We present an end-to-end analysis of AI across the complete research lifecycle.<n>We identify a sharp, stage-dependent boundary between reliable assistance and unreliable autonomy.<n>We show that greater automation can obscure rather than eliminate failure modes.
• Score: 107.0834449839233
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: AI-assisted research is crossing a threshold: fully automated systems can now generate research papers for as little as $15, while long-horizon agents can execute experiments, draft manuscripts, and simulate critique with minimal human input. Yet this productivity frontier exposes a deeper integrity problem: under scientific pressure, even frontier LLMs still fabricate results, miss hidden errors, and fail to judge novelty reliably. Studying developments through April 2026, we present an end-to-end analysis of AI across the complete research lifecycle, organized into four epistemological phases: Creation (idea generation, literature review, coding & experiments, tables & figures), Writing (paper writing), Validation (peer review, rebuttal & revision), and Dissemination (posters, slides, videos, social media, project pages, and interactive agents). We identify a sharp, stage-dependent boundary between reliable assistance and unreliable autonomy: AI excels at structured, retrieval-grounded, and tool-mediated tasks, but remains fragile for genuinely novel ideas, research-level experiments, and scientific judgment. Generated ideas often degrade after implementation, research code lags far behind pattern-matching benchmarks, and end-to-end autonomous systems have not yet consistently reached major-venue acceptance standards. We further show that greater automation can obscure rather than eliminate failure modes, making human-governed collaboration the most credible deployment paradigm. Finally, we provide a structured taxonomy, benchmark suite, and tool inventory, cross-stage design principles, and a practitioner-oriented playbook, with resources maintained at our project page.

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