From Prose to Properties: Testing Research Claims with ARATest for Agent-Native Science

Yifeng He, Jiachen Liu, Hao Chen

AI agents now run experiments and report findings, so research produces claims faster than researchers can check them. Each empirical claim implies a property that must hold over its cases, but it states that property only in prose. Without an explicit property, no test can decide which evidence would falsify a claim, so validation cannot keep pace with the claims agents produce. To make claims testable, we approximate a claim's semantics by abstracting its property skeleton, a parameterized relation that recurs across claims. We present ARATest, a property-based testing library that checks these skeletons as executable tests. A typed declaration binds a claim to a skeleton and fixes the claim's compared quantities, cases, scope, and numerical policy. A shared case type makes every generator supply cases in the claim's statistical unit. A three-valued semantics assigns each property one of three verdicts: holds, violated, or inconclusive. Every violation carries a replayable witness. A default generator reads the evidence that agent-native research artifacts (ARA) link to each claim, and auto-research generators dispatch an agent to run released code for fresh cases. Our…