SCIRIGOR:Evaluating Open-Ended Scientific Analysis Beyond Final Scores

Abstract

Scientific coding agents produce interdependent code, results, figures, and claims, yet evaluating final outputs alone does not establish whether their conclusions are scientifically supported. We formulate evidence-grounded multimodal scientific analysis, requiring agents to produce executable analyses and claims supported by results and visualizations from the same run. We introduce SciRIGOR, an evaluation framework and benchmark comprising 100 cases from scientific articles across six domains and 17 subfields. The framework reconstructs typed evidence graphs, separates artifact fidelity from relational validity, and scores complete claim-support paths while localizing the earliest unsupported relation. Source-grounded alternative paths accommodate scientifically equivalent analyses and visualizations. We evaluate 11 agent/model configurations. On full-benchmark runs, claims agree with faithful and unfaithful results at nearly identical rates (91.8% versus 91.0%). Yet no system exceeds 62.6% on the soft evidence-chain score or 18.0% strict whole-chain success. These findings show that internal coherence does not establish scientific correctness: evaluation must verify support along the complete data-to-claim path.