The Agentic Garden of Forking Paths

Abstract

arXiv:2607.01507v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Empirical research rarely admits a unique analysis. Different analytical choices can lead to different conclusions from the same data, yet these hidden forking paths are difficult to observe. We show that AI agents capture much of the analytical variation among human researchers while making these paths explicit. Across four high-stakes domains, assigning different personas is sufficient for AI agents to report divergent, often opposing, conclusion