arXiv Machine Learning

Efficient Context-Limited Telescope Bibliography Classification for the WASP-2025 Shared Task Using SciBERT

The paper presents a SciBERT-based method for automatically classifying scientific papers into four telescope-related categories—science, instrumentation, mention, and not telescope—within strict 512-token limits. Despite truncation challenges, the approach achieved a macro F1 score of 0.89, topping the WASP-2025 leaderboard. The authors analyze truncation effects, compare chunking and long-context models, and offer insights into efficient scientific text curation.

arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

RATIO: A Benchmark for Retrieval Across Typed Ideation Operations in Scientific Literature

RATIO (Retrieval Across Typed Ideation Operations) is a large-scale benchmark designed to evaluate how well retrieval systems can support scientific inspiration. It defines relevance through three ideation moves—Address, Broaden, and Specify—each targeting different levels of abstraction in literature retrieval. The benchmark is built from millions of full-text CS papers using a novel discourse-marker distant supervision method, and includes extensive LLM and human vetting to ensure quality.

By Maayan Sharon, Tom Hope
arXiv AI
Sep 17

Rethinking Domain Specialization for Open-Ended Scientific Reasoning in Astronomy Language Models

The paper investigates whether domain-specific fine‑tuning benefits open‑ended scientific reasoning in astronomy. Using a curated 300‑question QA benchmark from 2017–2026 Olympiad‑style materials, the authors compare open‑weight, API‑served general‑purpose, multimodal, and astronomy‑specialized language models. Results show that strong general‑purpose models set the highest correctness baseline, but variations in metric agreement, judge sensitivity, benchmark composition, and modality suggest that domain specialization is task‑ and deployment‑dependent and that domain‑specific evaluation is crucial for scientific workflows.

By Vanessa Lama, Sanjay Das, Emily Herron, Yuan-Sen Ting, Tijmen de Haan, Junqi Yin, Tirthankar Ghosal, Feiyi Wang
arXiv AI
Oct 26

Astro2Method: Benchmarking LLMs on Machine Learning Method Selection in Astronomy

Astro2Method is a benchmark comprising 500 expert-reviewed binary questions drawn from 346 astronomy papers, designed to evaluate large language models (LLMs) on selecting machine learning methods for astronomical problems. The study tests five LLMs, finding high accuracy (87.50‑92.55%) on Easy questions but lower performance (58.87‑64.52%) on Hard ones. Various retrieval-augmented and agent-based approaches, including web search and masked pipeline descriptions, show limited or inconsistent improvements, indicating that LLMs still struggle to infer suitable ML methods from related studies and domain knowledge.

By Xingzhong Fan, Hangfeng He, Fatemeh Nargesian
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 2

The Scientific Contribution Graph: Automated Literature-based Technological Roadmapping at Scale

The paper introduces the Scientific Contribution Graph, a large-scale resource that extracts 6 million scientific contributions from 655 k open-access papers across multiple disciplines and links them with 36 million prerequisite edges. It frames automated technological roadmapping as the task of identifying contributions and their prerequisites, and presents a new scientific prerequisite prediction task where models forecast which existing technologies enable future discoveries. The authors report that current models achieve a 0.48 MAP score on temporally-filtered backtesting, indicating rapid progress in this area.

By Peter A. Jansen
arXiv AI
Oct 15

SciRerankBench: Benchmarking Rerankers Towards Scientific Retrieval-Augmented Generation with LLMs

SciRerankBench is a benchmark designed to evaluate rerankers in retrieval‑augmented large language models (RAG‑LLMs) for scientific literature question answering. It covers five scientific subjects and introduces three types of question‑context‑answer pairs—Noisy Contexts, Semantically Similar but Logically Irrelevant Contexts, and Counterfactual Contexts—to test noise resilience, relevance disambiguation, and factual consistency. The study evaluates 13 popular rerankers across five LLM families, offering detailed insights into their strengths and limitations.

By Haotian Chen, Qingqing Long, Meng Xiao, Xiao Luo, Wei Ju, Chengrui Wang, Yuanchun Zhou, Xuezhi Wang, Hengshu Zhu
arXiv AI
Oct 2

Science or Slop?: Benchmarking and Mitigating Scientific Slop in AI-Generated Papers

The paper "Science or Slop?: Benchmarking and Mitigating Scientific Slop in AI-Generated Papers" introduces SciSlopBench, a dataset of 390 AI‑generated papers paired with human‑written counterparts, and defines six measures across Structure, Argument, and Artifacts to detect scientific slop. The authors show that these measures can identify AI papers with 85.9% accuracy and that higher slop correlates with lower ICLR ratings and distinguishes rejected from accepted papers. They also propose SciSlopHarness, a framework that guides a fixed LLM to revise only evidence‑supported sections, reducing the AI‑human gap by 63% without human reference targets.

By Yerim Oh, Young-Jun Lee, Jaewoo Ahn, Gunhee Kim, Dongyeop Kang
arXiv AI
Sep 4

SHELF: A Synthetic Harness for Multi-Task Bibliographic Benchmarking

SHELF is a Python system that creates synthetic, controlled benchmark data for evaluating large language models on bibliographic tasks such as classification, clustering, retrieval, pair classification, and instruction retrieval. It generates 62,899 model-written documents based on Library of Congress vocabularies and compares methods like TF, TF‑IDF, BM25, popular encoders, and zero‑shot decoders, reporting performance metrics such as 0.8887 for subject classification and 0.2605 for genre‑form classification. The tool also allows independent variation of bibliographic facets and can produce unseen documents beyond a model’s training cutoff, with results indicating that model rankings transfer more reliably than absolute scores when compared to other benchmarks.

By Michael J. Bommarito II
arXiv AI
Sep 16

AquiLLM: Evaluating Faithfulness in Open-Weight RAG-LLM Systems for Scientific Research

arXiv:2609.16519v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Scientific research increasingly relies on large, heterogeneous data sources, motivating interest in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems that...

By Bernie Boscoe, Srinath Saikrishnan, Vikram Seenivasan, Jack Stark, Andrew Lizarraga, Morgan Himes, Jonathan Soriano, PJ Allen, Tuan Do