arXiv:2606. 02632v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) models, especially large language models (LLMs), are increasingly used to generate scientific hypotheses and mechanistic explanations from observational data.
By Tyler H. McCormick
arXiv:2606. 04751v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as autonomous agents in scientific tasks.
By Leonardo Bertolazzi, Katya Tentori, Raffaella Bernardi
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.
By Sebastien Kawada, Manolis Kellis
arXiv:2606. 08532v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Modern artificial intelligence excels at prediction but cannot explain.
By Lei Lin, Xinlong Pan, Ronghao Wang, Chunbao Zhou, Jue Wang, Yangang Wang, Ivana Rasovska
The paper introduces the task of Scientific Claim Unlearning and presents a new benchmark, SciUnlearn, to evaluate it. It highlights that language models trained on static scientific corpora risk disseminating outdated or retracted claims as scientific knowledge evolves. Current machine unlearning methods fail to effectively remove claim-level knowledge, often only suppressing it superficially, underscoring the need for specialized techniques for structured knowledge removal.
By Snigdha Paul, Manasi Patwardhan, Arman Cohan
Defeasible reasoning is a type of reasoning where inferences are drawn from plausible current evidence, but can be retracted upon the introduction of newer evidence. Although recent studies have exami...
arXiv:2609.37891v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Current pre-training datasets are derived from web crawls, with all their issues, and were not designed to support mid- and post-training pipelines--...
By Pierre-Carl Langlais, Pieter Delobelle, Yannick Detrois, Pavel Chizhov, Carlos Rosas-Hinostroza, Neil Si Smail, Benjamin Burtin, Hanna Shcharbakova, Ivan Yamshchikov, Anastasia Stasenko
This study investigates whether large language models (LLMs) can reliably answer scientific questions and how susceptible they are to manipulation by fringe scientific material. The authors modified custom LLMs to prioritize knowledge from selected fringe papers on the Fine Structure Constant and Gravitational Waves, then compared their responses with those of domain experts and standard LLMs. The altered models produced fluent, convincing answers that contradicted scientific consensus and were difficult for non-experts to detect as misleading, demonstrating that LLMs are vulnerable to manipulation and cannot replace expert judgment.
By Harry Collins, Hartmut Grote, Paul Newbury, Patrick Sutton, Simon Thorne
arXiv:2608.30413v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Defeasible reasoning is a type of reasoning where inferences are drawn from plausible current evidence, but can be retracted upon the introduction of n...
By Jayanta Sadhu, Sayem Shahad, Kenneth Marino
The paper investigates whether large language models (LLMs) follow Occam's Razor when performing inductive and abductive reasoning. It introduces a synthetic framework for generating questions that require both types of reasoning and a new automated metric to evaluate the simplicity and correctness of generated hypotheses. Experiments show that while LLMs can handle simple scenarios, they struggle with complex world models and producing high‑quality, simplest hypotheses, even when using advanced reasoning techniques.
By Yunxin Sun, Abulhair Saparov
arXiv:2606. 28358v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) aims to enhance the trustworthiness of Large Language Models (LLMs) by grounding their outputs in external documents, often using inline citations for verifiability.
By Ian van Dort (University of Amsterdam), Maria Heuss (University of Amsterdam)
arXiv:2604. 27540v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Scientific reasoning rarely stops at what is directly observable; it often requires uncovering hidden structure from data.
By Chaemin Jang, Woojin Park, Hyeok Yun, Dongman Lee, Jihee Kim