ai research engineers

Abstract: Quantum open-source software provides essential infrastructure for quantum science, and artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping its capabilities and transforming its development. However, verifying quantum software at scale remains difficult, and AI-generated contributions can increase the workload of maintainers. In this Perspective, we examine verification as a central requirement for reliable AI-assisted quantum software development and research. We analyze public repositories, records covering 110 repositories from five annual quantum open-source hackathons that we organize, and responses from more than 1600 participants in a community survey. Our analysis connects limitations in automated verification with the review burden on quantum software maintainers. We propose verification practices and contribution standards that require contributors to support their changes with reproducible evidence for maintainer review. We also examine how quantum open-source software can provide infrastructure for AI-driven research whose results the community can independently verify and build upon. We maintain an open-source companion repository to support reproducibility and help projects adopt and refine these proposals. Together, these contributions help the quantum open-source software community translate advances in AI into reliable quantum research through reproducible verification.

Abstract: Training environments remain a major bottleneck for agents in data-driven scientific discovery. Existing collections of executable and verifiable training environments are small, and their construction remains difficult to scale. To address this limitation, we introduce Poseidon, an automated pipeline for generating diverse, verifiable training environments from scientific code repositories at scale. From the same repository budget, Poseidon extracts nearly 10 times as many training environments as a prior approach by decomposing scientific workflows into four complementary task types: Reproduction, Subflow, Completion, and Correction, where each type targets a distinct capability for scientific research. A recursive improvement loop further refines failed candidates and recovers otherwise discarded environments. Using Poseidon, we construct Pearl, a collection of 97,659 executable and verifiable environments from 7,110 public repositories spanning 10 scientific disciplines. To the best of our knowledge, Pearl is the largest and most broadly multidisciplinary collection of scientific-agent training environments to date. Qwen3.5 models (9B, 27B, and 35B-A3B) trained on Pearl achieve consistent gains across six challenging scientific-agent benchmarks. Overall, the scale and diversity of Pearl offer opportunities for training scientific discovery agents.

Abstract: We present GenLimitLib, a source-aligned Lean 4 library for language generation in the limit. Introduced by Kleinberg and Mullainathan at NeurIPS 2024, language generation in the limit studies a theoretical question motivated by LLMs: how to generate valid new strings from observed examples. This young and rapidly evolving field offers a natural testbed for studying large-scale formalization. GenLimitLib contains formal developments for 30 papers. It extracts shared definitions and reusable proof components while preserving paper-specific assumptions and statements, and records relationships across papers. In this way, GenLimitLib provides a concrete and structured view of the literature. We show through mathematical case studies and LLM experiments how our library can support both human mathematical research and AI-assisted research. Our Library: https://github.com/pengzhang91/generation-in-the-limit-lib.

Abstract: Reasoning problems often admit multiple valid ways to proceed. Continuous reasoning promises to move computation beyond language tokens into a more compact latent space, but representing several plausible ways to think next remains difficult. We introduce Autoregressive Thought Flow (ATF), which models the next continuous thought as a multimodal distribution. A causal autoregressive model performs the reasoning computation, while a lightweight diffusion head generates a plausible next thought from the resulting condition. The sampled thought is fed back into the model, allowing continuous reasoning to unfold for a variable number of steps while preserving the pretrained backbone. Across mathematical reasoning tasks, ATF improves accuracy with compact latent traces and benefits from reinforcement learning and additional test-time thinking. Multi-sample evaluation shows broader solution coverage, indicating that its multimodal predictions capture useful diversity among reasoning paths. Our results suggest that continuous reasoning is more effective when multiple possible next thoughts remain available rather than being collapsed into a single prediction.