Toward Ultra-Long-Horizon Agentic Science: Cognitive Accumulation for Machine Learning Engineering
This work addresses the challenge of maintaining strategic coherence and iterative refinement in artificial intelligence systems over ultra-long scientific research cycles. To this end, it introduces the ML-Master 2.0 agent, which reconfigures context management as a cognitive accumulation process through a Hierarchical Cognitive Cache (HCC) architecture. Inspired by multi-level memory systems, HCC dynamically distills execution trajectories into stable knowledge, decoupling immediate actions from long-term strategy and thereby transcending the limitations of static context windows. Integrated with dynamic knowledge distillation, cross-task experience consolidation, and large language model–driven autonomous experiment planning, the proposed approach achieves a state-of-the-art medal rate of 56.44% on MLE-Bench under a 24-hour budget, demonstrating for the first time the feasibility of fully autonomous, ultra-long-horizon scientific discovery.