ABSTRACT

GScientific Machine Learning (SciML) integrates data-driven inference with physical modeling to solve complex problems in science and engineering. However, the design of SciML architectures, loss formulations, and training strategies remains an expert-driven research process, requiring extensive experimentation and problem-specific insights. We introduce AgenticSciML, a collaborative multi-agent system in which over 10 specialized AI agents collaborate to propose, critique, and refine SciML solutions through structured reasoning and iterative evolution. The framework integrates structured debate, retrieval-augmented method memory, and ensemble-guided evolutionary search, enabling the agents to generate and assess new hypotheses about architectures and optimization procedures. Across physics-informed learning and operator learning tasks, the framework discovers solution methods that outperform single-agent and human-designed baselines by up to four orders of magnitude in error reduction. The agents produce novel strategies--including adaptive mixture-of-expert architectures, decomposition-based PINNs, and physics-informed operator learning models--that do not appear explicitly in the curated knowledge base. These results show that collaborative reasoning among AI agents can yield emergent methodological innovation, suggesting a path toward scalable, transparent, and autonomous discovery in scientific computing.

BIO

George Karniadakis is from Crete. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Engineering, National Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellow. He received his S.M. and Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1984/87). He was appointed Lecturer in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT and subsequently joined the Center for Turbulence Research at Stanford/NASA Ames. He joined Princeton University as Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and as Associate Faculty in the Program of Applied and Computational Mathematics. He was a Visiting Professor at Caltech in 1993 in the Aeronautics Department and joined Brown University as Associate Professor of Applied Mathematics in the Center for Fluid Mechanics in 1994. After becoming a full professor in 1996, he continued to be a Visiting Professor and Senior Lecturer of Ocean/Mechanical Engineering at MIT. He is an AAAS Fellow (2018-), Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM, 2010-), Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS, 2004-), Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME, 2003-), and Associate Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA, 2006-). He received the William Benter Award (2026), the SES G.I. Taylor Medal (2014), the SIAM/ACM Prize on Computational Science & Engineering (2021), the Alexander von Humboldt Award (2017), the SIAM Ralf E. Kleinman Award (2015), the J. Tinsley Oden Medal (2013), and the CFD Award (2007) by the US Association for Computational Mechanics. His h-index is 160 (highest in Applied Mathematics) and he has been cited over 156,000 times.

BIO

Treasured member of the Northwestern faculty from 1977 until his death in 2014, Ted Belytschko was a central figure in the McCormick community and an internationally renowned researcher who made major contributions to the field of computational structural mechanics. One of the most cited researchers in engineering science, Belytschko developed explicit finite element methods that are widely used in crashworthiness analysis and virtual prototyping in the auto industry. He received numerous honors, including membership in the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was a founding director of the U.S. Association for Computational Mechanics, and in 2012, the association named a medal in his honor. The ASME Applied Mechanics Award was renamed the ASME Ted Belytschko Applied Mechanics Division Award in November 2007. Belytschko also served as editor-in-chief of the International Journal for Numerical Methods in Engineering, and he was co-author of the books "Nonlinear Finite Elements for Continua and Structures" and "A First Course in Finite Elements."

ABOUT TED BELYTSCHKO

Treasured member of the Northwestern faculty from 1977 until his death in 2014, Ted Belytschko was a central figure in the McCormick community and an internationally renowned researcher who made major contributions to the field of computational structural mechanics. One of the most cited researchers in engineering science, Belytschko developed explicit finite element methods that are widely used in crashworthiness analysis and virtual prototyping in the auto industry. He received numerous honors, including membership in the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was a founding director of the U.S. Association for Computational Mechanics, and in 2012, the association named a medal in his honor. The ASME Applied Mechanics Award was renamed the ASME Ted Belytschko Applied Mechanics Division Award in November 2007. Belytschko also served as editor-in-chief of the International Journal for Numerical Methods in Engineering, and he was co-author of the books "Nonlinear Finite Elements for Continua and Structures" and "A First Course in Finite Elements."

Co-sponsored by the Departments of Mechanical Engineering and Civil & Environmental Engineering