[Submitted on 4 Sep 2026]
Title:K-Dense BYOK: An Open-Source AI Research Assistant That Runs Locally and Keeps a Hash-Chained Lab Notebook
View a PDF of the paper titled K-Dense BYOK: An Open-Source AI Research Assistant That Runs Locally and Keeps a Hash-Chained Lab Notebook, by Aubrey M. Brueckner and 3 other authors
View PDF HTML (experimental)
Abstract:K-Dense BYOK (bring your own keys) is a free, open-source AI research assistant for scientists in any field that runs on the researcher's own computer. The researcher supplies access to a model of their choice, hosted or running locally, and the application supplies everything else: a place for the work to run, a layer of scientific scaffolding, and a complete record. Each project is an ordinary folder, so the data, the code, the results, and the record stay on a machine the researcher administers and can be read years later without the application. Three things separate it from a chat assistant or a general-purpose coding agent. It ships a library of written scientific procedures, guided workflow templates, catalogs of where research data can be found, and reviewer and writer roles the agent can hand work to. It keeps a Living Lab Notebook whose entries link into an argument and are added to but never erased. And it records what happened by watching what the agent does rather than by taking the agent's word for it, in a log the agent has no tool that can write to. That choice targets the most common failure, model overclaiming, in our earlier benchmark of nine frontier models, by making claims checkable rather than preventing them. On twenty interdisciplinary research prompts, scored under a rubric fixed in advance, K-Dense BYOK led two managed platforms on both scientific quality and research execution. Its deliverables were the only ones that recorded the software they ran in, and the only ones that usually arrived with a command that regenerates the results. One of the managed platforms ran the same frontier model and supplied neither. Those environment records were files the agent wrote, not part of the observed log, which does not yet capture the software environment itself. The code is available under the MIT license at this https URL.
Comments: 38 pages, 8 figures plus a graphical abstract; includes benchmark prompts, scoring rubric, and per-prompt scores. Code: this https URL
Subjects:
Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)
Cite as: arXiv:2610.00074 [cs.AI]
(or arXiv:2610.00074v1 [cs.AI] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.00074
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
Submission history
From: Timothy Kassis [view email] [v1] Fri, 4 Sep 2026 23:26:54 UTC (688 KB)
Full-text links:
Access Paper:
View a PDF of the paper titled K-Dense BYOK: An Open-Source AI Research Assistant That Runs Locally and Keeps a Hash-Chained Lab Notebook, by Aubrey M. Brueckner and 3 other authors
View PDF
HTML (experimental)
TeX Source
view license
Current browse context:
cs.AI
new | recent | 2026-10
Change to browse by:
cs
References & Citations
NASA ADS
Google Scholar
Semantic Scholar
Loading...
Data provided by:
Bibliographic Tools
Bibliographic and Citation Tools
Bibliographic Explorer Toggle
Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?)
Connected Papers Toggle
Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?)
Litmaps Toggle
Litmaps (What is Litmaps?)
scite.ai Toggle
scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?)
Code, Data, Media
Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article
alphaXiv Toggle
alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?)
Links to Code Toggle
CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?)
DagsHub Toggle
DagsHub (What is DagsHub?)
GotitPub Toggle
Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?)
Huggingface Toggle
Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?)
ScienceCast Toggle
ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?)
Demos
Demos
Replicate Toggle
Replicate (What is Replicate?)
Spaces Toggle
Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?)
Spaces Toggle
TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?)
Related Papers
Recommenders and Search Tools
Link to Influence Flower
Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?)
Core recommender toggle
CORE Recommender (What is CORE?)
Author
Venue
Institution
Topic
About arXivLabs
arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators
arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.
Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.
Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.
Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)