SOURCE-LINKED INTELLIGENCE

Federation Is Nearly Free, Reasoning Is Not: Tradeoffs for AI Co-Scientists in Protein Characterization Workflows

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Aug 25, 2026 · UTC

Natural language driven autonomous co-scientist workflows involve a fundamental trade-off between flexibility and reasoning at the expense of determinism, reproducibility, and observability. Such agents increasingly must communicate across institutional boundaries, where federation topology can shape latency and cost. We systematically evaluated these tradeoffs using a controlled ablation on a production agentic platform for science. We use a verifiable task: given a protein sequence, we ask an agent to confidently characterize its function by routing across common tools. We compare federation

Read original source ↗ Open in workspace

recordType

paper

region

Global