Autonomous scientific research agents are increasingly applied to end-to-end scientific workflows, including literature review, data analysis, experimentation, and report generation. However, open-ended research tasks often do not clearly specify the analyses, methods, and success criteria required to complete the task. As a result, agents may miss important analyses, use inappropriate methods, or draw conclusions that are insufficiently supported by evidence. To address the problem, we present AutoSciRub, an evaluation-first framework that induces a task-specific executable rubric before research execution, and uses it to guide execution, criterion-level verification as well as iterative revision. AutoSciRub decomposes an underspecified instruction into atomic scientific goals, grounds them in relevant literature and task-visible data, and synthesizes specific, actionable, and verifiable criteria. The resulting rubric makes implicit experimental and evidential requirements explicit, providing guidance for experiments and analyses. During revision, rubric-guided verification identifies unmet criteria and enables targeted refinement of the research report and its supporting artifacts. On ResearchClawBench, AutoSciRub consistently improves all tested configurations, with an average gain of 2.08 points across three backbone LLMs under the fixed Codex harness and 2.95 points across three agent harnesses using a fixed DeepSeek-V4-Flash backbone. On a randomly sampled 20-task subset of AstaBench E2E Discovery, AutoSciRub further achieves an average improvement of 16.8 points across three agent harnesses, while maintaining or increasing the number of successfully completed tasks. These results demonstrate that evaluation-first guidance provides an effective and generalizable control mechanism for autonomous scientific research (Code: https://github.com/zjunlp/AutoSciRub).
Evaluating language-model agents at scale increasingly relies on a second language model as an automatic judge, because the gold signal, an executable environment reward, is expensive, slow, or unavailable at deployment time. Such a judge is a reward-free proxy whose value depends on whether it can be trusted, yet existing judges either hand-write the scoring rubric, as in G-Eval, or fine-tune the judge's weights, and both tend to credit fluent but unsuccessful trajectories as successes. We instead induce the text of an agent-judging rubric from a small set of ground-truth-labeled trajectories, grounding it in true outcomes. We present RubricForge, which evolves a judge rubric by reflective evolution against labeled trajectories to maximize agreement with the environment reward, freezes it, and applies it to held-out trajectories in one model call with no environment access. The optimized artifact is human-readable text, so every verdict is attributable to named criteria. Using one frozen 7B model as both agent and judge, on tau-bench (173 labeled trajectories drawn from 220 rollouts) and WebShop (160), the principal gain is faithfulness rather than raw agreement. The edge over a generic G-Eval judge is not statistically significant (McNemar p = 0.248), and absolute-score calibration marginally favors the generic judge (|err| difference -0.048, p = 2x10^-4). Yet RubricForge over-credits failed trajectories roughly half as often (0.115 vs. 0.173 false-pass rate on tau-bench, with three over-credit catches and zero reversals) and ranks graded WebShop outcomes more faithfully (Spearman 0.410 vs. 0.370). For a reward-free evaluator the false-pass rate, not aggregate agreement, is the deployment-relevant quantity, since a false pass ships a broken agent whereas a false fail merely costs a retry.