CLEAR: Structured Specifications for Controllable Long-Horizon ML Research Engineering

Xin Liu, Hongru Song, Ruqing Zhang, Jiafeng Guo, Xueqi Cheng

Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly being used to automate machine learning (ML) research workflows, ranging from code development and experiment execution to research reproduction and scientific discovery. Recent systems demonstrate that LLMs can perform substantial portions of ML research engineering with limited human intervention. These advances suggest a shift from automating individual research tasks toward automating long-horizon workflows that transform research artifacts into executable ML systems. However, ML research engineering remains substantially more difficult than isolated code generation. A research artifact typically specifies a system only implicitly through a mixture of natural-language descriptions, equations, pseudo-code, implementation details, datasets, and evaluation protocols. An agent must first infer the intended computational structure, translate it into executable components, coordinate their dependencies, and repeatedly diagnose and repair failures during execution. Consequently, the quality of the final system depends not only on code generation, but also on whether the agent can maintain a consistent representation of what should…