ScienceClaw: Benchmarking Continual Self-Evolution of AI-for-Science Agents Across the Natural and Social Sciences
Mingda Zhang, Wenjin Liu, Tiesunlong Shen, Zikai Xiao, Zhenghong Lin, Qing Xu, Erik Cambria, Xiaoying Tang, Haoran Luo
Abstract
Large language model agents are accelerating scientific automation, yet verified executions rarely become persistent program-level improvements, and existing evaluations do not examine this process across sequential tasks in both the natural and social sciences. We formalize ScienceClaw as fixed-parameter program self-evolution that unifies task solving, scientific verification, and program updates. ScienceClaw-Eval spans 23 disciplines and measures scientific correctness, evolutionary gain, retention, cross-dataset transfer, and evolution cost through sequential streams and independent reset evaluation. Our framework repairs executable workflows through multi-turn interaction, converts re-execution-verified failure--success trajectories into linked Skill and Operator candidates, and retains an update only when source-task replay reproduces the repair and independent scientific tasks improve. Code is available at https://github.com/beita6969/ScienceClaw.