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Current medical benchmarks typically break down clinical competence into isolated factual questions, single-image tasks, or static case vignettes. These tests score individual answers, but reveal less about whether a model can integrate subspecialty knowledge with multimodal evidence and track a patient's condition throughout a course of care. To close this gap, we introduce NPCBench, a clinical apprenticeship benchmark for nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC). NPCBench mirrors specialist training, from guideline and foundational knowledge to case planning, longitudinal review, CarePath integration, and open-ended consultation. It contains 4,777 component and consultation items and a 100-patient CarePath cohort with 417 scored diagnostic and care tasks. The episode-level evaluation tests whether diagnostic and care answers are jointly correct within a care pathway. By linking stepwise tasks to patient-level care trajectories, NPCBench evaluates whether models ground decisions in visual evidence, interpret changes in patient state, and meet clinical requirements in consultation. Across 30 evaluated models, we observe a composition gap: strong performance on individual tasks does not ensure jointly correct diagnostic and care answers for the same patient. Among 21 multimodal models, strict CarePath success reaches at most 23%. Paired controls and physician calibration further examine evidence grounding, longitudinal revision, and consultation judging. Overall, NPCBench broadens the evaluation of medical artificial intelligence beyond static question-answering paradigms to an apprenticeship-oriented assessment of clinical workflows, thereby offering a testbed for evidence-based and temporally coherent reasoning in oncology care.

AI research agents automate the cycle of proposing, implementing, and evaluating experiments, opening a path toward recursive self-improvement. Yet their ability to propose experiments outpaces their capacity to execute them in real environments, making outcome prediction a key capability for sustained self-improvement under limited experimental budgets. We investigate language models as Research World Models (RWMs), which predict the outcomes of candidate interventions across research environments. Our evaluation draws on over 2,600 experimental records from nine research environments spanning pretraining, post-training, and inference, representing more than 171,000 H100 GPU-hours of experimentation. Research knowledge acquired from real experimental experience improves RWM predictions of unseen interventions within the same environment (Spearman +0.27), and can be reused across environments. For example, using only pretraining experience from OLMo3, Marin, and Nanochat, an RWM reduces selection regret in the Qwen3 environment by 78% compared with zero-experience setting. These benefits extend to multi-round Autoresearch under a fixed selection budget: RWMs with in-env and cross-env research knowledge increase the best gain achieved by 15.8% and 11.6%, respectively. Ablations across 13 language models used as RWMs show that adding research knowledge can improve intervention ranking more than changing models or increasing reasoning effort alone. These findings support language models as RWMs and motivate accumulating experimental data for future RWM training.