Agentic evolution of physically constrained foundation models

Abstract

Artificial intelligence increasingly drives automated scientific discovery, yet contemporary generalist agents lack physical grounding, frequently hallucinating hardware-incompatible designs. Here, we present a physically grounded, multi-agent discovery engine that autonomously architects hardware-compliant computing systems. Anchored by an Evolutionary Knowledge Graph structuring past scientific innovations, the framework extracts an "algorithmic Chain-of-Thought" to transform blind stochastic search into directed structural evolution. Applied to the extreme testbed of foundation model deployment, the engine evolved two hardware-aware compression methodologies surpassing human-engineered heuristics: Q-Enhance mitigates long-context accuracy loss in dense models, and MoE-Salient-AQ outperforms state-of-the-art manual sparse Mixture-of-Experts designs by 3.7% at sub-3-bit regimes. Utilizing a bandwidth-efficient Sensitivity Profile, we successfully deployed a massive 235-billion-parameter model onto a constrained dual-A100 server, reducing memory requirements by 75% with a marginal 0.64% accuracy degradation. By transforming unconstrained combinatorial search into knowledge-driven autonomy, this establishes a scalable hardware-software co-design paradigm for machine-driven discovery within strict physical boundaries.