arXiv:2606. 29182v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Open-ended scientific discovery with large language models (LLMs) increasingly operates as a long-horizon loop of hypothesis search and verification, where a reward signal guides which hypotheses to test next.
arXiv:2606. 30335v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous scientific discovery systems increasingly use large language models (LLMs) to propose new hypotheses, but many such systems condition primarily on experimental memory: archives of high-scoring candidates or heuristic summaries of recent trials.
The paper proposes a distributional theory explaining how large language models (LLMs) incorporate external evidence into their decision-making process. It identifies three key predictions: (1) evidence is more persuasive when it aligns with the model’s prior beliefs, (2) models more readily accept errors from their own internal processes than from external sources, and (3) the same evidence can improve weaker models while harming stronger ones. Extensive experiments across ten million trials, twelve LLMs from four families, and eight domains—including quantum mechanics, physics, genetics, and molecular biology—confirm these predictions and reveal that evidence integration occurs late in the network as a structured sequence of steps rather than through a simple trust metric.
arXiv:2602. 06448v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM)-based scientific agents have accelerated scientific discovery, yet they often suffer from significant inefficiencies due to adherence to fixed initial priors.
arXiv:2608. 06128v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Search agents extend large language models beyond static parametric memory by enabling them to acquire and use ex ternal evidence during multi-step reasoning.
arXiv:2608. 15669v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Scientific discovery often involves optimising expensive-to-evaluate objectives over vast, structured, and open-ended hypothesis spaces, such as molecules, protein sequences, and computer programs.
arXiv:2606. 11851v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Open-ended scientific discovery asks agents to move beyond executing analyses for predefined questions.
arXiv:2606. 04751v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as autonomous agents in scientific tasks.
arXiv:2609.01526v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Scientific agents must learn not only how to reason, but also what to believe. However, existing LLM agents typically express scientific hypotheses in...
The paper introduces Agentic Reasoning for Tree Search (ARTS), a method that uses a reasoning language model to navigate the hypothesis‑experiment space in scientific discovery. Unlike traditional approaches that conflate hypothesis quality with execution quality and prune search logs, ARTS evaluates prior execution logs to distinguish implementation failures from poor hypotheses and selects the next hypothesis to pursue. By employing test‑time training to embed search‑tree knowledge into model weights, ARTS achieves a 15.3% relative improvement over leading algorithms on 22 benchmark tasks and enables smaller models like Qwen3‑4B to match or exceed the performance of larger closed‑source models at lower inference cost.
arXiv:2607. 28684v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing benchmarks for scientific equation discovery are largely composed of well-known equations available in the public domain, making it difficult to determine whether a model is discovering laws from data or merely recalling answers from its training corpus.
arXiv:2607. 03426v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) exhibit strong reasoning and world-knowledge capabilities, yet often struggle to gather information effectively across the multi-turn interactions required in sequential decision-making settings.
arXiv:2607. 01131v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous scientific discovery systems offer the potential to accelerate research by automating the process of hypothesis generation and validation.