PhysMaster: Building an Autonomous AI Physicist for Theoretical and Computational Physics Research

Abstract

Advances in LLM reasoning and tool use have enabled agentic science, yet frontier theoretical and computational physics remains challenging because research requires deep domain expertise, long-horizon reasoning, and reliable numerical computation. We introduce PRL-Bench, a research-reproduction benchmark adapted from 100 Physical Review Letters papers across major areas of modern physics. PRL-Bench distills realistic research workflows into traceable tasks with explicit intermediate artifacts and diverse evaluation rubrics; each task is estimated by domain experts to require more than six hours for a specialized PhD student to reproduce independently. Evaluations show that existing agents remain unreliable on extended research workflows. We therefore present PhysMaster, a scientific agent combining adaptive MCTS-based multi-trajectory exploration with hierarchical memory to improve long-horizon robustness and knowledge accumulation. PhysMaster achieves the highest overall PRL-Bench score of 51.08, outperforming Codex, OpenHands, OpenClaw, and ReAct, and yields relative improvements of 14.13 percent to 93.38 percent across backbone models. Error analysis shows that PhysMaster substantially reduces failures from incomplete long-horizon execution, while remaining bottlenecks lie in physics knowledge and analytical reasoning. Together, PRL-Bench and PhysMaster provide a rigorous benchmark and effective system for advancing autonomous AI research in frontier physics.

23 pages, 4 figures