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SciMON: Scientific Inspiration Machines Optimized for Novelty

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arxiv 2305.14259 v7 pith:FJTOAFEC submitted 2023-05-23 cs.CL cs.AIcs.LG

classification cs.CLcs.AIcs.LG
keywords noveltyscientificgenerateideaslanguageliteraturemodelswork
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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We explore and enhance the ability of neural language models to generate novel scientific directions grounded in literature. Work on literature-based hypothesis generation has traditionally focused on binary link prediction--severely limiting the expressivity of hypotheses. This line of work also does not focus on optimizing novelty. We take a dramatic departure with a novel setting in which models use as input background contexts (e.g., problems, experimental settings, goals), and output natural language ideas grounded in literature. We present SciMON, a modeling framework that uses retrieval of "inspirations" from past scientific papers, and explicitly optimizes for novelty by iteratively comparing to prior papers and updating idea suggestions until sufficient novelty is achieved. Comprehensive evaluations reveal that GPT-4 tends to generate ideas with overall low technical depth and novelty, while our methods partially mitigate this issue. Our work represents a first step toward evaluating and developing language models that generate new ideas derived from the scientific literature

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Cited by 6 Pith papers

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

  1. AbGen: Evaluating Large Language Models in Ablation Study Design and Evaluation for Scientific Research

    cs.CL 2025-07 conditional novelty 7.0 of 10

    A benchmark of 1,500 expert-annotated ablation study designs from 807 NLP papers shows frontier LLMs underperform human experts and that LLM-as-a-judge evaluations correlate weakly with human judgments.

  2. ExAnte: A Benchmark for Ex-Ante Inference in Large Language Models

    cs.LG 2025-05 conditional novelty 7.0 of 10

    Models leak future knowledge despite explicit temporal cutoffs, as quantified by the ExAnte benchmark across four tasks.

  3. Can LLMs Identify Critical Limitations within Scientific Research? A Systematic Evaluation on AI Research Papers

    cs.CL 2025-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    LIMITGEN evaluates LLMs on identifying paper limitations and shows strong models still miss roughly half of obvious flaws, with retrieval augmentation giving modest but consistent gains.

  4. 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...

  5. Is Inter-Seed Cross-Play Enough? Evaluating the Robustness of Zero-Shot Coordination Algorithms to Implementation Details

    cs.AI 2026-08 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    For Other-Play in Yokai, agents trained with different implementation details coordinate across implementations about as well as across seeds, supporting inter-seed cross-play as a proxy for cross-implementation evaluation.

  6. 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.

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