SciToolAgent-Evo: An Ontology-Aware Self-Evolving Agent for Open-World Scientific Tool Acquisition

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence [Submitted on 30 Jul 2026] SciToolAgent-Evo: An Ontology-Aware Self-Evolving Agent for Open-World Scientific Tool Acquisition Yuqi Tang, Chenyi Zhou, Libin Wang, Keyan Ding, Qiang Zhang, Huajun Chen Large language model (LLM) agents have been increasingly adopted in scientific research for organizing and invoking specialized computational tools. However, their reliance on predefined tool spaces with static semantics limits their applicability to open-world scientific workflows, where tool requirements, capabilities, and boundaries evolve dynamically. To this end, we propose SciToolAgent-Evo, an ontology-aware self-evolving agent for open-world scientific tool acquisition. Driven by an evolving memory of skills, experiences, and an ontologized tool graph, it distills generalizable knowledge from contrastive trajectories during accumulation, whereas during inference, it formulates active requests and utilizes a LinUCB-based bandit gate to dynamically balance exploration and exploitation. Once a novel tool is acquired, its scientific ontology is completed online for seamless integration into the known graph. Moreover, we introduce OpenSciToolBench, a benchmark containing 900 realistic tasks across four difficulty levels. Extensive evaluations show that SciToolAgent-Evo achieves state-of-the-art performance, validating its robustness and generalization. Comments: 19 pages, 4 figures, under review Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computation and Language (cs.CL) Cite as: arXiv:2607.28692 [cs.AI]   (or arXiv:2607.28692v1 [cs.AI] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.28692 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Yuqi Tang [view email] [v1] Thu, 30 Jul 2026 08:47:11 UTC (3,591 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-07 Change to browse by: cs cs.CL References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)