FARS: A Fully Automated Research System Deployed at Scale

Qiong Tang, Tianxiang Sun, Xiangkun Hu, Xiangyang Liu, Yiran Chen, Yunfan Shao, Bobo Li, Changze Lv, Cheng Xu, Chengsong Huang, Chunyang Li, Dizhan Xue, Hao Bai, Haodong Duan, Hengquan Guo, Hongyang He, Hongyi Chen, Hui Shen, Jiahao Yuan, Jiankai Sun, Jikang Cheng, Jinfeng Xu, Jingqi Tong, Jingye Chen, Jinxiu Liu, Jixuan Leng, Junchi Yu, Kaixun Jiang, Kun Xiang, Kunpeng Yao, Lang Feng, Liangqi Yuan, Longsen Gao, Meng Li, Qi Jia, Qiushi Sun, Shengyuan Ding, Shizhan Gong, Siru Zhong, Terry Jingchen Zhang, Tianle Gu, Tianyi Liang, Weijie Liu, Weikai Yang, Weizhi Fei, Xin Wang, Xinpeng Liu, Xuanwen Ding, Yihong Tang, Yuanli Wang, Yukun Jiang, Yuming Yang, Zhengbao He, Zhikai Chen, Zhikun Xu, Zhuang Li, Zihao Huang

Recent automated research systems show that language-model agents can generate hypotheses, run experiments, and write complete manuscripts, but most evidence still comes from selected examples, human-framed topics, or a few pre-defined research tasks. We present FARS (Fully Automated Research System), a fully automated AI-for-AI research system designed to operate across research topics at scale. FARS autonomously generates and advances projects through ideation, planning, experimentation, and writing, using stage-specific agents coordinated through a shared workspace that records proposals, code, logs, results, and manuscripts. In its first public deployment, FARS produced 166 complete research papers spanning 67 fine-grained AI/ML topics while preserving intermediate artifacts as an auditable corpus rather than a curated set of successes. We evaluate this corpus with 282 structured reviews from volunteer reviewers covering 140 papers, including overall ratings, sub-scores, integrity checks, and LLM-use disclosure. The reviews indicate that FARS can produce review-worthy and occasionally strong AI/ML research artifacts in a large-scale public deployment, while also exposing recurring failure modes in narrow experimental scope, methodological limitations, and integrity issues.