arXiv AI

Minimum Description Length Unsupervisedly Separates Law-Grade from Statistical-Grade Knowledge in a Self-Improving Science Agent - and Reveals 86% of Its Own Discoveries Are Statistical

The paper reports on a self‑improving science agent that has admitted 252 scientific relations and uses Minimum Description Length (MDL) compression ratios as an unsupervised epistemic grader. The MDL‑ranked top discoveries match canonical physical laws (e.g., vis‑vis‑a, Balmer/Rydberg) with strong statistical enrichment and no counterexamples, while 86 % of the agent’s ledger entries compress poorly (cr≈1) and are identified as statistical regularities rather than true laws. The study introduces a dual‑axis bookkeeping system separating prediction value (R²) from compression value (cr), demonstrates its robustness, and presents falsifiable predictions.

arXiv AI
Sep 7

TruthInsightBench: An Evidence-Grounded Benchmark for Automated Evaluation of Open-Ended Scientific Discovery Agents

TruthInsightBench is a new benchmark designed to evaluate automated scientific discovery agents by presenting them with 40 blind tasks drawn from peer‑reviewed studies across ten domains. Each task provides only a neutral objective and frozen data, withholding source conclusions, expected values, and analysis paths, forcing agents to determine which claim the data support. A fixed LLM‑based judge scores agents on evidentiary maturity across six dimensions, using 29 artifact‑grounded items, enabling fully automated, repeatable evaluation without human grading.

By Zhibo Yang, Chen Zhang, Yuewei Zhang, Hao Wang
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

Fidelity Is Not Enough: Dispatch-Level Instrumentation for Agentic Datasheet Extraction

The paper reports that a model can pass fidelity checks—verifying that extracted values match the source—without actually opening a datasheet, due to a hidden constraint that disables tool use. To address this, the authors log every tool call in an agentic benchmark and develop two instruments: a rule‑based failure‑attribution classifier and a silent‑failure detector that flags runs based solely on which tools were invoked. While the detector shows low false positives on clean extractions and recovers all planted faults, its recall against correct tool usage but incorrect answers remains unmeasured, and a partial causal chamber confirms only a subset of claims, highlighting limitations in physical verification.

By Qing Ye, Meng-Hsuan Lin
arXiv AI
Oct 9

LLM-IDEA: Identifiability-Driven Experimental Agent for Autonomous Discovery of Mechanistic World Models

The paper introduces LLM-IDEA, an identifiability‑driven experimental agent that guides large language model scientists in closed‑loop discovery of mechanistic world models. It incorporates an identifiability engine that classifies experimental plateaus as capability limits, resolvable within the design class, or certified exhausted, and demonstrates its effectiveness on benchmarks such as ODEBench, DiscoverPhysics, and a custom Alien Universe testbed. The agent’s ability to distinguish when further experimentation is futile versus when new designs are needed improves the efficiency and reliability of autonomous scientific discovery.

By Surya Shetty, Ulisses Braga-Neto
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Oct 8

LLM-IDEA: Identifiability-Driven Experimental Agent for Autonomous Discovery of Mechanistic World Models

LLM-IDEA is an identifiability‑driven experimental agent that guides large language model scientists in autonomous discovery of mechanistic world models. It evaluates whether a plateau in learning is due to the agent’s capability limits, the model’s resolvability within the design class, or a certified exhaustion of the experiment space. The system demonstrates its effectiveness across benchmarks such as ODEBench, DiscoverPhysics, and a custom Alien Universe testbed, consistently identifying when additional experiments are futile and when new experimental designs are required.

arXiv AI
Sep 2

Can LLMs Discover Scientific Laws in Real and Parallel Worlds?

The paper introduces SCILAWS-BENCH, a benchmark for evaluating large language models (LLMs) on scientific law discovery. It contains 118 problems from 381 scientific papers, covering 291 candidate laws and about 8 million real data points across six disciplines. The benchmark offers two settings: SCILAWS-REAL, where models must propose laws from fixed real observations, and SCILAWS-PARALLEL, where models actively query synthetic worlds to recover hidden laws.

By Yiming Huang, Ziche Liu, Zhuohang Wu, Yiqian Wang, Junxia Cui, Xinkai Zou, Linjun Mao, Nan Huang, Naicheng Yu, Kaijie Zhu, Yue Ma, Kun Zhou, Letian Peng, Jingbo Shang
arXiv AI
Oct 5

ULTRADISCOVERY: Abductive Exploration in an Interconnected, Epistemically Open Universe

ULTRADISCOVERY is a benchmark that tests abductive exploration in an epistemically open, interconnected universe. It features five domains where agents must revise an initial theory and predict outcomes of unseen cross‑domain interventions, with a $2 imes 2$ design manipulating representation openness and evidence alignment. Experiments show that agents struggle to compose evidence into transferable representations, especially when the representation is open, and that even with aids exact predictions are rare without large budgets.

By Weihan Li, Tianshi Zheng, Yangqiu Song, Ginny Y. Wong, Simon See
arXiv AI
Oct 7

Toward Alignment Scaling Laws: A Framework and First Preregistered Measurements

The paper proposes a framework for studying how alignment difficulty scales with model size, treating alignment as a family of measurable scaling relations for different risk categories. It introduces operational definitions of burden, distinguishes observed, audited, and true alignment, and proves that the largest exponent among corrected risks determines long‑run behavior. The authors preregistered and applied the protocol to public data, finding scaling exponents for attack success, truthfulness, dispositions, sycophancy, and a backdoor, and released interactive browser games to illustrate the laws.

By Jeremy Canale