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Large Language Models are Zero Shot Hypothesis Proposers

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arxiv 2311.05965 v1 pith:ILMBTKFA submitted 2023-11-10 cs.CL

classification cs.CL
keywords scientificllmshypotheseshypothesiscapabilitiesdiscoverygenerationliterature
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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Significant scientific discoveries have driven the progress of human civilisation. The explosion of scientific literature and data has created information barriers across disciplines that have slowed the pace of scientific discovery. Large Language Models (LLMs) hold a wealth of global and interdisciplinary knowledge that promises to break down these information barriers and foster a new wave of scientific discovery. However, the potential of LLMs for scientific discovery has not been formally explored. In this paper, we start from investigating whether LLMs can propose scientific hypotheses. To this end, we construct a dataset consist of background knowledge and hypothesis pairs from biomedical literature. The dataset is divided into training, seen, and unseen test sets based on the publication date to control visibility. We subsequently evaluate the hypothesis generation capabilities of various top-tier instructed models in zero-shot, few-shot, and fine-tuning settings, including both closed and open-source LLMs. Additionally, we introduce an LLM-based multi-agent cooperative framework with different role designs and external tools to enhance the capabilities related to generating hypotheses. We also design four metrics through a comprehensive review to evaluate the generated hypotheses for both ChatGPT-based and human evaluations. Through experiments and analyses, we arrive at the following findings: 1) LLMs surprisingly generate untrained yet validated hypotheses from testing literature. 2) Increasing uncertainty facilitates candidate generation, potentially enhancing zero-shot hypothesis generation capabilities. These findings strongly support the potential of LLMs as catalysts for new scientific discoveries and guide further exploration.

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Cited by 7 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. HypoChainer: A Collaborative System Combining LLMs and Knowledge Graphs for Hypothesis-Driven Scientific Discovery

    cs.HC 2025-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    In a small user study and two case studies, a hypothesis-chain workflow grounded in knowledge graphs helped biomedical researchers construct and validate hypotheses from machine-learning predictions more effectively t...

  2. ScienceMeter: Tracking Scientific Knowledge Updates in Language Models

    cs.CL 2025-05 reject novelty 6.0 of 10

    ScienceMeter evaluates language model knowledge updates across three axes, preservation of old scientific claims, acquisition of new claims, and projection to future findings, and finds all current methods fall short.

  3. Toward Reliable Scientific Hypothesis Generation: Evaluating Truthfulness and Hallucination in Large Language Models

    cs.CL 2025-05 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A new benchmark (TruthHypo) and a knowledge-grounded hallucination detector (KnowHD) show that grounding scores can partially select truthful LLM-generated biomedical hypotheses, but the result is at risk from knowled...

  4. Automatic Evaluation Metrics for Artificially Generated Scientific Research

    cs.CY 2025-02 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A simple title-and-abstract model predicts citation counts better than review scores and outperforms LLM reviewers in matching human review scores, but remains below human consistency.

  5. InternAgent: When Agent Becomes the Scientist -- Building Closed-Loop System from Hypothesis to Verification

    cs.AI 2025-05 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    A closed-loop LLM-agent framework that auto-generates research ideas and code, reported to improve baseline performance on all 12 tasks it was tested on.

  6. What Are Research Hypotheses?

    cs.CL 2025-08 conditional novelty 4.0 of 10

    A position paper documenting inconsistent and often implicit definitions of 'hypothesis' across NLP hypothesis mining tasks and calling for standardization.

  7. How Far Are AI Scientists from Changing the World?

    cs.AI 2025-07 conditional novelty 4.0 of 10

    This survey proposes a four-level capability framework for AI Scientist systems and, using an AI reviewer, finds that current systems produce papers rated well below normal scientific standards.

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