LLM-generated research ideas cluster more around bridge-like opportunities and synthesis methods than the broader distribution seen in human papers.
ResearchBench: Benchmarking LLMs in Scientific Discovery via Inspiration-Based Task Decomposition
13 Pith papers cite this work, alongside 1 external citations. Polarity classification is still indexing.
abstract
Large language models (LLMs) have shown potential in assisting scientific research, yet their ability to discover high-quality research hypotheses remains unexamined due to the lack of a dedicated benchmark. To address this gap, we introduce the first large-scale benchmark for evaluating LLMs on a sufficient set of scientific discovery sub-tasks-inspiration retrieval, hypothesis composition, and hypothesis ranking-where sufficient means that perfectly solving these sub-tasks perfectly solves the overall discovery task. We develop an automated LLM-based framework that extracts critical components-research questions, background surveys, inspirations, and hypotheses-from papers across 12 disciplines, with expert validation confirming its accuracy. To prevent data contamination, we focus exclusively on publications from 2024 onward, ensuring minimal overlap with LLM pretraining data; our automated framework further enables automatic extraction of even more recent papers as LLM pretraining cutoffs advance, supporting scalable and contamination-free automatic renewal of this discovery benchmark. Our evaluation shows that, across disciplines, LLMs excel at inspiration retrieval-an out-of-distribution task-suggesting their ability to surface novel knowledge associations.
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Introduces the Matter to Mechanism benchmark of 2,645 structured instances and a composite metric suite for evaluating AI co-scientists on problem-to-hypothesis reasoning in battery materials research.
Frontier LLMs reason well about past science but are near chance at judging whether specific advances will happen, systematically late on when, and overconfident — even with extra pre-cutoff knowledge.
Current AI agents fail to reliably invent transferable ML methods on a controlled 140-task benchmark, and more test-time compute or context does not remove the scientific-judgment bottleneck.
AstroAlertBench evaluates multimodal LLMs on astronomical classification accuracy, reasoning, and honesty using real ZTF alerts, revealing that high accuracy often diverges from self-assessed reasoning quality.
LLM agents execute scientific tasks but fail to follow core scientific reasoning norms such as evidence consideration and belief revision based on refutations.
Arbor combines a coordinator, executors, and a hypothesis tree to enable cumulative autonomous research, outperforming Codex and Claude Code by over 2.5x on six real tasks and reaching 86.36% Any Medal on MLE-Bench Lite.
ScientistOne introduces Chain-of-Evidence and an audit system that achieves zero hallucinated references, perfect score verification, and top method-code alignment while matching or beating human experts on five frontier tasks and generalizing to six more.
LEAPBench shows trajectory scoring changes best-model rankings on 53% of tasks, LLMs do not beat Bayesian optimization, and domain-aware prompting underperforms domain-agnostic on biology tasks aligned with published literature.
IDRBench, a new benchmark, shows that LLMs can produce plausible interdisciplinary research ideas but cannot reliably identify or distinguish genuine cross-disciplinary integration.
Structuring LLM hypothesis generation around deductive-nomological explanation, causal processes, and universals is reported to beat direct prompting, with two generated ideas implemented as the CTAT and HALO algorithms.
A survey organizing AI-powered research automation into five workflow stages, defining AutoResearch and Vibe Research, and proposing five evaluation dimensions while noting domain-conditioned limits on autonomy.
A survey consolidating benchmarks, agent frameworks, real-world applications, and protocols for LLM-based autonomous agents into a proposed taxonomy with recommendations for future research.
citing papers explorer
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Measuring the Gap Between Human and LLM Research Ideas
LLM-generated research ideas cluster more around bridge-like opportunities and synthesis methods than the broader distribution seen in human papers.
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Matter to Mechanism: A Benchmark for AI Co-Scientists in Materials and Battery Research
Introduces the Matter to Mechanism benchmark of 2,645 structured instances and a composite metric suite for evaluating AI co-scientists on problem-to-hypothesis reasoning in battery materials research.
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Scientific reasoning does not reliably translate into scientific forecasting in frontier AI
Frontier LLMs reason well about past science but are near chance at judging whether specific advances will happen, systematically late on when, and overconfident — even with extra pre-cutoff knowledge.
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MLS-Bench: A Holistic and Rigorous Assessment of AI Systems on Building Better AI
Current AI agents fail to reliably invent transferable ML methods on a controlled 140-task benchmark, and more test-time compute or context does not remove the scientific-judgment bottleneck.
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AstroAlertBench: Evaluating the Accuracy, Reasoning, and Honesty of Multimodal LLMs in Astronomical Classification
AstroAlertBench evaluates multimodal LLMs on astronomical classification accuracy, reasoning, and honesty using real ZTF alerts, revealing that high accuracy often diverges from self-assessed reasoning quality.
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AI scientists produce results without reasoning scientifically
LLM agents execute scientific tasks but fail to follow core scientific reasoning norms such as evidence consideration and belief revision based on refutations.
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Toward Generalist Autonomous Research via Hypothesis-Tree Refinement
Arbor combines a coordinator, executors, and a hypothesis tree to enable cumulative autonomous research, outperforming Codex and Claude Code by over 2.5x on six real tasks and reaching 86.36% Any Medal on MLE-Bench Lite.
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ScientistOne: Towards Human-Level Autonomous Research via Chain-of-Evidence
ScientistOne introduces Chain-of-Evidence and an audit system that achieves zero hallucinated references, perfect score verification, and top method-code alignment while matching or beating human experts on five frontier tasks and generalizing to six more.
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LEAP: Trajectory-Level Evaluation of LLMs in Iterative Scientific Design
LEAPBench shows trajectory scoring changes best-model rankings on 53% of tasks, LLMs do not beat Bayesian optimization, and domain-aware prompting underperforms domain-agnostic on biology tasks aligned with published literature.
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IDRBench: Understanding the Capability of Large Language Models on Interdisciplinary Research
IDRBench, a new benchmark, shows that LLMs can produce plausible interdisciplinary research ideas but cannot reliably identify or distinguish genuine cross-disciplinary integration.
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DN-Hypo-Pipeline: An AI-Driven Workflow for Generating Hypotheses using Large Language Models and Scientific Explanations
Structuring LLM hypothesis generation around deductive-nomological explanation, causal processes, and universals is reported to beat direct prompting, with two generated ideas implemented as the CTAT and HALO algorithms.
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AutoResearch AI: Towards AI-Powered Research Automation for Scientific Discovery
A survey organizing AI-powered research automation into five workflow stages, defining AutoResearch and Vibe Research, and proposing five evaluation dimensions while noting domain-conditioned limits on autonomy.
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From LLM Reasoning to Autonomous AI Agents: A Comprehensive Review
A survey consolidating benchmarks, agent frameworks, real-world applications, and protocols for LLM-based autonomous agents into a proposed taxonomy with recommendations for future research.