arXiv AI

SpecEvo: Speculative Evolution with Large Language Models for Cost-Efficient Scientific Discovery

SpecEvo is a multi‑Large Language Model framework that uses lightweight models to generate and refine candidate programs while an Advisor consolidates evidence from successes and failures. At sparse checkpoints, a frontier‑model Navigator intervenes with synthesis or refinement to address search stagnation. Across 176 tasks in scientific and algorithmic domains, SpecEvo matches or surpasses frontier‑model baselines, cuts API cost by up to 80%, and improves evaluation efficiency and benchmark performance.

arXiv AI
Oct 15

Structure Liberates: How Constrained Sensemaking Produces More Novel Research Output

The paper introduces SciSense, a framework that structures scientific ideation into eight cognitive stages and a dataset, SciSense-Traj, of 120K citation-conditioned research trajectories in both hindsight and foresight modes. It presents SciSense-LM, a family of LLMs trained on these trajectories, showing that hindsight-trained models yield higher-quality, more novel outputs and improve downstream coding agents’ research artifacts. The study demonstrates that outcome-anchored ideation reduces cognitive load for downstream agents, enabling more creative exploration.

By James Mooney, Zae Myung Kim, Young-Jun Lee, Dongyeop Kang
arXiv AI
Jun 10

Towards Diverse Scientific Hypothesis Search with Large Language Models

arXiv:2606. 10587v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are on the rise for accelerating scientific discovery, most recently in advanced tasks such as generating valid scientific hypotheses.

By Haorui Wang, Parshin Shojaee, Kazem Meidani, Kunyang Sun, Jos\'e Miguel Hern\'andez-Lobato, Teresa Head-Gordon, Jiajun He, Chandan K. Reddy, Chao Zhang, Yuanqi Du
arXiv AI
Aug 17

ScienceFlow: A long-horizon agent for ML research, scientific discovery and beyond

arXiv:2608. 14354v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Enabling LLM agents to sustain productive, stable, and goal-aligned research over extended horizons is a central challenge for autonomous machine learning and scientific discovery, as progress hinges on continuously managing evolving state, exploration decisions, and computational resources.

By Mingming Zhao, Jiqian Dong, Kangping Xu, Zadid Hasan, Chengrui Fan, Shan Jiang, Shuai Mao, Ting Lingya, Linyi Zou, Tailin Zhou, Yun Hin Chan, Wenkai Zhang, Zhanhong Zhou, Guowei Huang, Hongliang Li, Wenjing Cun, Zhitang Chen, Mingxuan Yuan, Yanhui Geng
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 14

PACEvolve: Enabling Progress-Aware Consistent Evolution

The paper introduces PACEvolve, a framework that improves self‑evolving agents powered by Large Language Models by addressing their tendency to become trapped in local contexts and repeat flawed hypotheses. It does so through three techniques: Hierarchical Context Management to prune memory, Momentum‑Based Backtracking to escape local minima, and a self‑adaptive Collaborative Evolution policy to balance refinement and knowledge transfer. These methods enable the agents to maintain a global view of search momentum and achieve state‑of‑the‑art results on complex evolutionary benchmarks.

By Minghao Yan, Bo Peng, Benjamin Coleman, Ziqi Chen, Zhouhang Xie, Shuo Chen, Zhankui He, Noveen Sachdeva, Isabella Ye, Weili Wang, Chi Wang, Ed H. Chi, Fernando Pereira, Wang-Cheng Kang, Derek Zhiyuan Cheng, Beidou Wang
arXiv AI
Jul 14

FIRE-Bench: Evaluating AI Agents on the Rediscovery of Scientific Insights

arXiv:2602. 02905v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Autonomous agents powered by large language models (LLMs) promise to accelerate scientific discovery end-to-end, but rigorously evaluating their capacity for verifiable discovery remains a central challenge.

By Zhen Wang, Fan Bai, Zhongyan Luo, Jinyan Su, Kaiser Sun, Xinle Yu, Jieyuan Liu, Kun Zhou, Claire Cardie, Mark Dredze, Zhiting Hu, Eric P. Xing
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 29

SciDataSailor: Deep Scientific Data Exploring

Scientific datasets are commonly organized as hierarchical repositories containing heterogeneous and interdependent files, making their inspection, integration, and analysis labor-intensive and reliant on domain expertise. Although large language model (LLM) agents have advanced substantially in planning, reasoning, and tool use, existing research has largely overlooked their ability to interact with real scientific data assets through executable environments.

arXiv AI
4d ago

SciGame: Let Agents Play the Scientific Discovery Games in the Real and Counterfactual World

SciGame is a new benchmark that transforms scientific literature into structured cards, each providing both an Original and a Counterfactual environment for the same task. It evaluates language‑model agents in identification and discovery scenarios under Prior‑only, Fixed, and Adaptive protocols, using historical canonical laws and a live temporal collection. Experiments with five advanced models reveal that prior knowledge can hurt performance when relations change, adaptive experimentation benefits strong models but not weak ones, and accurate explanations may mask quantitative errors, highlighting the difficulty of recovering exact symbolic laws.

By Yusheng Zhao, Bowei He, Xue Liu, Mingxiao Li