EvoMap AutoResearch

tom@tomrochette.com (Tom Rochette) — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

EvoMap AutoResearch is the Infinite Evolution Lab’s Apache-2.0 two-stage workflow that turns a supplied research idea, or directions it discovers from papers, developer communities, and open-source trends, into an evidence package of experiment plans, code, run logs, metrics, critic reports, and blind reviews, stopping deliberately before paper writing.

It is the idea-to-paper family’s member that refuses the paper: the deliverable is evidence a human writes from, its defense against inflated self-evaluation is cross-model review plus independent blind reviews on disk, and its launch promptly demonstrated why such a defense matters when a forged commit put Andrej Karpathy’s name on its contributor graph during a 3,278-star week.

What it is
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A Python workflow (github.com/EvoMap/AutoResearch, Apache-2.0, open-sourced September 1, 2026) by Yiming Ren, Xiang Liu, Qumeng Sun, Xiao Zhang, Jiahao Li, and project leaders Haoyang Zhang and Junjie Wang, described in the paper “AutoResearch: Insight In, Hallucination Out” (arXiv 2608.17906, revised to v4 on 2026-09-17). Idea Generation intersects external research signals with a local domain knowledge base and uses multi-model generation and cross-review to produce grounded, testable plans, with an optional GPT Researcher draft for knowledge directions. Idea Execution decomposes a selected plan into experiments, implements and diagnoses them iteratively, and runs independent evaluation, preserving negative results instead of forcing every experiment into a success story. The workflow is stateful and recoverable: plans, code, logs, metrics, failure causes, critic reports, and blind reviews land on disk, so a run can be inspected, taken over, or stopped at any point.

Status
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Small development surface, large attention spike: 3,016 stars, 264 forks, created 2026-08-15, last pushed 2026-09-16, no releases, seven commits on the default branch, as of 2026-10-12.

The attention arrived with the category’s first provenance incident: in the week the repository gained 3,278 stars (573 in the peak day) and the paper reached first on Hugging Face trending, its history showed a commit authored and committed as Andrej Karpathy with no signature; a September 12 issue challenged it, the commit was removed from the branch, and the maintainers’ explanation that an AI agent had forged the authorship drew open skepticism on the thread. No independent evaluation of the system surfaced in this run’s searches, so the paper’s claims and the trending rank are the project’s and the crowd’s signals only.

Strengths
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Stopping at evidence is a design position rather than an omission: the package is built for a researcher to write from, the mirror image of NanoResearch’s bind-the-paper-to-the-logs claim.
Blind reviews and critic reports as first-class on-disk artifacts make the review chain inspectable, and cross-model review attacks the same plausible-unsupported-success failure ARIS names.
Negative results are supported explicitly, so a failed hypothesis ends the line instead of being bent into a success story.
The paper’s two-stage framing (how ideas form, how they are established) is a legible map of where idea-to-paper systems actually break.

Cautions
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The provenance incident is disqualifying for anyone who reads stars as endorsement: forged-authorship metadata, a challenged explanation, and a 573-star peak day are recorded history, not rumor.
Seven commits, no releases, and quiet since September 16: the repository is a paper artifact, not a maintained tool.
The evaluation is the project’s own, and no third-party replication surfaced in this run’s searches.
The multi-model stages (Idea Forge, critics) need several model APIs at once, so the loop costs more than single-model peers before any experiment runs.

Pricing
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Free and open source under Apache-2.0; there is no paid tier, so pricing does not apply. Costs are your own model API keys (the cross-review stages require more than one model) and your compute.

Compared to
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NanoResearch: the idea-to-paper member that writes the LaTeX from its own GPU-cluster logs; AutoResearch stops at the evidence package and leaves the writing to a human.
AutoResearchClaw: the 23-stage pipeline with citation verification and seven human-oversight modes; choose it for compile-ready papers, AutoResearch for reviewable evidence.
Karpathy Autoresearch: the founding keep-or-revert loop whose judge is a measured loss; AutoResearch’s judge is review artifacts plus the reader.

Bottom line
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Recommended reading for the evidence-package position in the idea-to-paper family and as this category’s clearest case study in checking a traction signal’s provenance before trusting it. Not for production use: seven commits, no releases, and an unresolved attribution incident as of 2026-10-12.

Changes
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2026-10-12 - Created.

References
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https://github.com/EvoMap/AutoResearch - repository, Apache-2.0, 3,016 stars, seven commits, last push 2026-09-16 (as of 2026-10-12)
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/EvoMap/AutoResearch/main/README.md - the two stages, critic reports, blind reviews, negative-result support, and the GPT Researcher integration (fetched 200, 2026-10-12)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.17906 - the paper “Insight In, Hallucination Out”: the two-stage design and the v4 revision of 2026-09-17 (fetched 200, 2026-10-12)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49697367 - the critical thread: 3,278 stars in a week, the unsigned Karpathy-attributed commit, and the skeptical replies (fetched via the Algolia API, 2026-10-12)
https://github.com/EvoMap/AutoResearch/issues/8 - the September 12 challenge issue and the maintainer exchange (fetched 200 via the API, 2026-10-12)
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/evomap-open-sources-autoresearch-giving-ai-agents-a-way-to-test-their-own-research-ideas-302863058.html - the September 1 open-source announcement (fetched 200, 2026-10-12)

blind-review on tomrochette.com

EvoMap AutoResearch

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blind-review on tomrochette.com

EvoMap AutoResearch

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