Automating quantum computing laboratory experiments with an agent-based AI framework
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Fully automated self-driving laboratories promise high-throughput, large-scale scientific discovery by reducing repetitive labor. However, they require deep integration of laboratory knowledge, which is often unstructured, multimodal, and hard to incorporate into current AI systems. This paper introduces the "k-agents" framework, designed to support experimentalists in organizing laboratory knowledge and automating experiments with agents. The framework uses large-language-model-based agents to encapsulate laboratory knowledge, including available operations and methods for analyzing results. To automate experiments, execution agents break multistep procedures into agent-based state machines, interact with other agents to execute steps, and analyze results. These results drive state transitions, enabling closed-loop feedback control. We demonstrate the system on a superconducting quantum processor, where agents autonomously planned and executed experiments for hours, successfully producing and characterizing entangled quantum states at human-level performance. Our knowledge-based agent system opens new possibilities for managing laboratory knowledge and accelerating scientific discovery.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it