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LLMs can Realize Combinatorial Creativity: Generating Creative Ideas via LLMs for Scientific Research

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arxiv 2412.14141 v2 pith:ENQQMVR4 submitted 2024-12-18 cs.AI

LLMs can Realize Combinatorial Creativity: Generating Creative Ideas via LLMs for Scientific Research

classification cs.AI
keywords creativitycombinatorialllmsresearchgenerationideatheoreticalacross
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Scientific idea generation has been extensively studied in creativity theory and computational creativity research, providing valuable frameworks for understanding and implementing creative processes. However, recent work using Large Language Models (LLMs) for research idea generation often overlooks these theoretical foundations. We present a framework that explicitly implements combinatorial creativity theory using LLMs, featuring a generalization-level retrieval system for cross-domain knowledge discovery and a structured combinatorial process for idea generation. The retrieval system maps concepts across different abstraction levels to enable meaningful connections between disparate domains, while the combinatorial process systematically analyzes and recombines components to generate novel solutions. Experiments on the OAG-Bench dataset demonstrate our framework's effectiveness, consistently outperforming baseline approaches in generating ideas that align with real research developments (improving similarity scores by 7\%-10\% across multiple metrics). Our results provide strong evidence that LLMs can effectively realize combinatorial creativity when guided by appropriate theoretical frameworks, contributing both to practical advancement of AI-assisted research and theoretical understanding of machine creativity.

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Cited by 7 Pith papers

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

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    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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  4. Emergent Languages in Populations of Language Model Agents: From Token Efficiency to Oversight Evasion

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  5. AI for Auto-Research: Roadmap & User Guide

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    cs.AI 2026-05 conditional novelty 4.0

    AI can generate research artifacts faster than it can verify them, so across all eight lifecycle stages the credible deployment mode is human-governed collaboration rather than full autonomy.

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