Abstract:Open-source scientific software is abundant, yet most tools remain difficult to compile, configure, and reuse, sustaining a small-workshop mode of scientific computing. This deployment bottleneck limits reproducibility, large-scale evaluation, and the practical integration of scientific tools into modern AI-for-Science (AI4S) and agentic workflows. We present Deploy-Master, a one-stop agentic workflow for large-scale tool discovery, build specification inference, execution-based validation, and publication. Guided by a taxonomy spanning 90+ scientific and engineering domains, our discovery stage starts from a recall-oriented pool of over 500,000 public repositories and progressively filters it to 52,550 executable tool candidates under license- and quality-aware criteria. Deploy-Master transforms heterogeneous open-source repositories into runnable, containerized capabilities grounded in execution rather than documentation claims. In a single day, we performed 52,550 build attempts and constructed reproducible runtime environments for 50,112 scientific tools. Each successful tool is validated by a minimal executable command and registered in SciencePedia for search and reuse, enabling direct human use and optional agent-based invocation. Beyond delivering runnable tools, we report a deployment trace at the scale of 50,000 tools, characterizing throughput, cost profiles, failure surfaces, and specification uncertainty that become visible only at scale. These results explain why scientific software remains difficult to operationalize and motivate shared, observable execution substrates as a foundation for scalable AI4S and agentic science.
Abstract:Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) synergizes the retrieval of pertinent data with the generative capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), ensuring that the generated output is not only contextually relevant but also accurate and current. We introduce XRAG, an open-source, modular codebase that facilitates exhaustive evaluation of the performance of foundational components of advanced RAG modules. These components are systematically categorized into four core phases: pre-retrieval, retrieval, post-retrieval, and generation. We systematically analyse them across reconfigured datasets, providing a comprehensive benchmark for their effectiveness. As the complexity of RAG systems continues to escalate, we underscore the critical need to identify potential failure points in RAG systems. We formulate a suite of experimental methodologies and diagnostic testing protocols to dissect the failure points inherent in RAG engineering. Subsequently, we proffer bespoke solutions aimed at bolstering the overall performance of these modules. Our work thoroughly evaluates the performance of advanced core components in RAG systems, providing insights into optimizations for prevalent failure points.