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GCRI · Labs

KI in wissenschaftlichen Arbeitsabläufen

Machine learning now enters science at every step: screening literature, designing experiments, analysing images and sequences, emulating simulations and drafting text. Each use can speed discovery and each can introduce errors that look like findings. This page sets out how models are evaluated for scientific use, where leakage, benchmark overfitting and silent drift arise, and what evidence editors, funders and regulators need before they rely on a model-assisted result.

01Arbeitsfläche

Wie die Arbeit abläuft.

System · rund um dieses ThemaBeispielhaft

Testbed operations

AI in scientific workflows · Field lab coast · Campaign 5

Sensors deployedGCRI · Labs

Sensor deployment

illustrative Küstenlinie

BuoyStationGaugeMeerBands: tidal rangeN

Sensors

S-01 tide940.0Nominal
S-04 salinity760.4Recalibrate
S-07 wave950.1Nominal

Sensor vs reference

Testbed operations: the screen’s structure, terms and states for AI in scientific workflows.Beispielnamen und beispielhafte Werte; ein Entwurf, kein Eintrag und kein Live-System.

Abb.Testbed operations: example names and illustrative values, not a record or a live system.

02Die Frage

AI in scientific workflows: how the risk develops.

Model evaluation and scientific assistance. The dossier below sets out how the risk develops, what is measured, where the data come from, how it is modelled and who decides.

Mechanismus

Leakage inflates performance

When information from the test set reaches training, through duplicates, shared patients, neighbouring sites or preprocessing fitted on all the data, a model appears more accurate than it is. Leakage has been documented in many fields that adopted machine learning.

Mechanismus

Benchmarks get overfitted

Repeated tuning against the same public benchmark selects models that fit its quirks. Gains on a leaderboard can vanish on new data, and contamination of training corpora with benchmark items makes scores hard to interpret.

Mechanismus

Drift and distribution shift

Instruments, protocols, populations and software change. A model validated on last year’s data or another lab’s scanner can degrade without any visible error. Monitoring after deployment is part of the evaluation, not an extra.

Mechanismus

Generated text and fabricated sources

Language models can produce fluent text, citations and code that are wrong. Unchecked, these errors enter manuscripts, peer reviews and proposals, and spread through citation. Disclosure and verification policies exist because such errors are hard to see.

03Methoden und Evidenz

How AI in scientific workflows is modelled, measured and tested.

Das Modell, seine Annahmen, seine Daten und seine Unsicherheit in der Form, in der eine Wissenschaftlerin oder ein Ingenieur sie prüfen würde. Die Strukturen folgen veröffentlichten Methoden. Die dargestellten Werte sind illustrativ, keine Befunde.

Modell, Gleichungen und Annahmen

The model structure used for AI in scientific workflows, the assumptions it makes and how each is tested.

Risiko des Elements iRi = f(Hi, Ei, Vi, Ci)Gefahr, Exposition, Verwundbarkeit und Bewältigungskapazität
Erwarteter jährlicher SchadenEAL = ∑k pk · Lküber Ereignisse k mit jährlicher Wahrscheinlichkeit pk
Gekoppelte Systemext+1 = A xt + B ut + εtA carries the couplings, u the shock, ε the error
AnnahmeWarum es entstehtWie es geprüft wird
Gefahr und Exposition sind innerhalb eines Ereignisses unabhängigHält das Schadensintegral berechenbarMit einer Copula-Anpassung an gemeinsamen Aufzeichnungen vergleichen
Kopplungen sind nahe dem Arbeitspunkt linearLässt Schocks sich über A ausbreitenÜber den linearen Bereich hinaus stören und vergleichen
Vulnerabilitätskurven lassen sich zwischen Orten übertragenLokale Kurven sind selten verfügbarAnhand beobachteter Schäden validieren, wo es sie gibt
Eingaben
versionierte Datensätze mit Herkunftsnachweis
Ergebnisse
Verteilungen, nie einzelne Zahlen
Code
mit Modellkarte und Tests veröffentlicht
Reproduktion
gleiche Daten, Code, Umgebung und Seed
Standardformulierungen für Risiko und Zustandsraum; die aufgeführten Annahmen sind für die Methode typisch und zur Prüfung benannt, keine Ergebnisse.
FAIR-Leitprinzipien · GO FAIR und FORCE11W3C PROV · World Wide Web ConsortiumHinweise zur einheitlichen Behandlung von Unsicherheiten · IPCCCEOS Analysis Ready Data · Committee on Earth Observation Satellites
04In the five domains

AI in scientific workflows changes each domain’s methods.

05Indikatoren

Was gemessen wird und wie gut.

Jeder Indikator trägt seine Einheit, seinen Rhythmus, die Art der zugrunde liegenden Quelle und die Evidenzkennzeichnung, die ein Wert tragen würde. Es werden keine Werte gezeigt: Ein Programm liefert sie unter seiner eigenen Autorität.

IndikatorEinheitTaktQuellentypKennzeichnung
Held-out evaluation design statedpercent of model-based studiesjährlichAudit against the REFORMS checklistBEOBACHTET
Code and model weights availablepercent of studies with runnable code and weightsjährlichRepository and article auditBEOBACHTET
External validationpercent of models tested on data from another site or periodjährlichLiterature reviewGESCHÄTZT
Kalibrierungsfehlerexpected calibration error, dimensionlessper modelHeld-out evaluationBEOBACHTET
Performance gap under shiftdifference in the primary metric between internal and external test setsper modelValidation reportsBEOBACHTET
AI use disclosurepercent of submissions with a disclosure statementjährlichJournal submission recordsDEKLARIERT
Contamination checks reportedpercent of benchmark evaluation reportsjährlichEvaluation reportsBERICHTET
06Quellen

Woher die Evidenz stammt.

Benannte öffentliche Datensätze und institutionelle Aufzeichnungen, jeweils mit ihrer Lizenzklasse. Quellen auf Vereinbarungsbasis werden nur zu ihren Bedingungen genutzt und niemals weiterveröffentlicht.

QuelleWas es liefertLizenzklasse
OpenMLDatasets, tasks and evaluation runs with standardised splitsOpen, CC BY
Hugging Face Hub model and dataset cardsDocumented models and datasets with stated training data and limitationsLicence per model or dataset
MLCommons benchmarksShared benchmarks and measurement rules for model performanceOpen, Apache 2.0
AI Incident Database (Responsible AI Collaborative)Reported failures and harms of deployed AI SystemeOffen, Namensnennung
Software HeritageArchived source code with persistent intrinsic identifiersOpen archive, licence per repository
arXiv metadataPreprints across physics, computing and quantitative biologyMetadata CC0; licence per paper
Zenodo (CERN)Citable deposits of code, models, data and evaluation outputsOpen, licence per record
07Entscheidungen

Wer entscheidet und wozu die Evidenz dient.

Labore prepares evidence. The decisions below are taken by the authorities named, under their own rules, and never by the platform.

Wer entscheidetDie FrageEvidenz, der diese Seite dient
Journal editors and reviewersWhether a model-based claim rests on an evaluation that excludes leakage and tests generalisationREFORMS or TRIPOD+AI checklist, split design, external validation, code availability
ForschungsfördererWhether applicants and reviewers may use generative AI, and on what disclosure termsFunder policy, disclosure records, documented verification of generated content
Medicines and device regulatorsWhether an AI component in a medical product is validated for its intended usePrespecified evaluation, external validation, predetermined change control plan
Research integrity officesWhether an allegation involving fabricated or generated content is substantiatedProvenance of text, data and code; version history; tool logs

Ergebnisse, die dieses Thema hervorbringt

  • Evaluation protocols that fix splits, metrics and baselines before training
  • Model cards and datasheets with intended use, limits and known failure modes
  • Leakage and contamination audits of model-assisted studies
  • Reproducible pipelines with code, weights, environment and data versions archived
08Kernfragen

What experts ask about AI in research.

  • What task is the model doing, and what is it compared against?
  • Was the model evaluated on data independent of the data it was trained or tuned on?
  • How does performance change when conditions shift away from the training data?
  • Can the output be checked by a person or a simpler method, and is it?
  • Which steps of the workflow were assisted, and is that disclosed in the result?
09Mechanismen und Treiber

Where AI helps and where it misleads.

Machine learning models learn statistical regularities from data. They can be very effective where those regularities are stable and data are plentiful, for example classifying land cover from satellite imagery or emulating a climate model to explore many scenarios. They are weaker where data are sparse, where the system changes over time or where rare events matter most, which describes much of risk science.

Common failure modes are well understood: leakage, where information from the test set reaches training; Verteilungsverschiebung, where conditions in use differ from those in training; shortcut learning, where a model relies on a spurious cue; and overconfident outputs without calibrated uncertainty. Generative models add the risk of fluent but fabricated content, including citations and code that looks correct but is not.

Workflow effects matter as much as model accuracy. When a tool is used at several stages, small errors can accumulate, and reviewers may give automated outputs more trust than they deserve.

10Methoden und Daten

How AI tools are evaluated.

  1. 01

    Held-out and out-of-distribution tests

    Evaluation on data separated by time, place or source. This is the minimum for any claim of generalisation.

  2. 02

    Baselines

    Comparison with simple statistical methods and expert judgement. A complex model that does not beat a simple baseline is not adding value.

  3. 03

    Calibration and uncertainty

    Checks that stated confidence matches observed accuracy, using Unsicherheitsquantifizierung.

  4. 04

    Provenance and disclosure

    A record of which model, version and prompts or settings were used at each step, so the workflow can be re-run or audited.

Benchmark scores rarely transfer directly to a new research setting, and a model’s behaviour can change between versions. Evaluation is repeated when either the task or the model changes.

12Where this page’s references

Where this page’s references lead.

Die Gremien und Dokumente, vor deren Hintergrund diese Seite gelesen wird. Status und Ausgaben ändern sich; jeder Link führt zur herausgebenden Stelle.

13Fragen

Fragen und Antworten.

What is data leakage?
Any route by which information about the test data influences training or model selection. It makes reported performance higher than the model will achieve on genuinely new data.
Is a high benchmark score enough to publish a method?
Not on its own. Reviewers increasingly expect external validation, uncertainty on the score, ablations and an account of how the benchmark was protected from contamination.
Can a generative AI tool be listed as an author?
COPE and the ICMJE say no, because authorship carries accountability a tool cannot hold. Use of such tools is disclosed in the methods or acknowledgements, under the journal’s policy.
Why publish model weights and code?
So others can rerun the evaluation, test on new data and find errors. Where weights cannot be shared, for privacy or safety, a controlled access route and a stated reason are the accepted alternative.
Does Labs use generative AI to write findings?
Any assisted step is designed to be disclosed. Findings are the responsibility of named researchers, who check every generated claim, citation and line of code.
Can Labs evaluate a commercial AI model?
A model can be evaluated under a published protocol. The result describes performance on the tested task and is not an endorsement or approval.
Why compare with simple baselines?
Because complex models often appear impressive on benchmarks but add little over a well-chosen simple method on real research data.
BerichteBeitragen

Evidenz von dieser Seite aus beitragen.

Berichte is the Consortium’s quarterly publication. What you know about this subject can become evidence, a case or a correction in the next edition, credited to you and published under CC BY 4.0 where it is your own work.

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