Negative Knowledge as Failure-aware Shared Memory for AutoResearch
Hanchun Wang
Abstract
AI-assisted research systems generate many failed attempts, but those failures rarely become a durable, shared knowledge asset. We propose a negative knowledge memory layer: a curator agent converts each failed attempt into a bounded, typed record in a shared bank, and a downstream research agent explicitly adopts or rejects those records before proposing its next experiment. We evaluate this layer in two settings: same-task retry on ScienceAgentBench and cross-task scientific research on two nonlinear math-physics PDE problems. The negative knowledge layer outperforms vanilla AutoResearch baselines while using fewer tokens; agents with the negative knowledge bank solve new tasks that all baselines fail to solve in PDE systems research. We also show that the previous negative knowledge bank can transfer and enhance AutoResearch on different PDE problems. These results suggest that structured negative knowledge is a knowledge asset that should be explicitly maintained in broader AI-engaged scientific research beyond a memory-compression or debugging aid, alongside positive findings, as a collective infrastructure for scientific memory. Code is available at https://github.com/hch-wang/Negative_Knowledge.
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Classified with taxonomy v2 on Sat, 5 Sept 2026.