Grounded Autonomous Research: A Fault-Tolerant LLM Pipeline from Corpus to Manuscript in Frontier Computational Physics

The paper presents an end-to-end LLM pipeline that maps 11,083 recent condensed-matter arXiv papers, selects a research direction, reproduces published references, runs novel first-principles calculations, and produces a manuscript on altermagnetic piezomagnetism. The workflow spans 47 fresh-context sessions across six phases and records 2,162 literature-consultation events. Its grounding strategy forces numerical confrontation at calibration checkpoints, while fresh-context isolation, distributed evidence, and adversarial review provide fault tolerance. The authors also report paired ablations targeting a pre-architecture baseline and a no-pilot workflow.