arXiv AI

On the Limits of LLM-as-Judge for Scientific Novelty Assessment

arXiv:2606. 12071v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLMs are increasingly used to generate and judge scientific ideas.

arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 27

Think-Probe-Respond: Improving Large Language Models as Judges of Research Idea Novelty

The paper introduces Think‑Probe‑Respond (TPR), a lightweight method to improve large language models’ ability to judge the novelty of research ideas. It identifies a systematic bias where models tend to label ideas as "medium novel" despite generating human‑like rationales, and shows that probing hidden states during reasoning and conditioning the final response on these probes boosts novelty judgment accuracy by 22.30%. TPR effectively reduces the medium‑novelty bias across strong baseline models.

By Tim Schopf, Tobias Schreieder, Akiko Aizawa
arXiv AI
Sep 12

NovGauge: A Fine-Grained Benchmark for Diagnosing LLMs' Capability in Paper Novelty Assessment

NovGauge is a new benchmark designed to diagnose large language models’ ability to assess scientific paper novelty. It contains 619 paper pairs and 50 multi-paper sets, each labeled along three dimensions—task, problem, and method—by experts from ICLR reviewer overlap claims and survey co-citations. The study evaluates 18 LLMs, revealing high hallucination rates and weak evidence grounding, with the best model achieving only 43‑72% verified F1 across dimensions.

By Guoqiang Zhang, Kexin Tan, Ming Zhang, Li Ju, Wenqing Jing, Zhonghan Yue, Jiayi Chen, Shiqiang Wu, Shaofan Liu, Yue Zhang, Yuankai Ying, Yang Shi, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
arXiv AI
Sep 25

Learning to Ideate for Scientific Impact

The paper "Learning to Ideate for Scientific Impact" explores using delayed signals of scientific uptake—specifically citation-normalized impact—as feedback to steer large language models toward generating high‑impact research ideas. The authors build a dataset of over 100,000 computer science papers, train a reward model to predict citation impact from goal‑idea pairs, and align an idea generator via supervised fine‑tuning and reinforcement learning. Evaluation with a reference‑grounded protocol shows that the RL‑tuned model consistently produces ideas with higher estimated impact than baseline models.

By Shubham Kale, Aniketh Garikaparthi, Manasi Patwardhan
arXiv AI
Jul 8

FirstResearch: Auditable Question Formation for LLM Scientific Discovery Agents

arXiv:2607. 05682v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM systems for scientific discovery increasingly assist with ideation, literature synthesis, experiment planning, and report generation, but the first research question they propose can remain difficult to audit: it may sound plausible without exposing the mechanism, falsifier, or assumption that a scientist should inspect.

By Yufeng Wang