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.
Predicting the answer to interventional ``what if'' questions --- the outcome of an action never taken --- requires a \emph{mechanistic}, causal model, not a curve fit; and learning such a model requires \emph{experiments}, because passive data leaves its mechanisms unidentified. Experiments are expensive, so the central problem is \emph{data efficiency}.
arXiv:2608. 09696v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Predicting the answer to interventional ``what if'' questions --- the outcome of an action never taken --- requires a \emph{mechanistic}, causal model, not a curve fit; and learning such a model requires \emph{experiments}, because passive data leaves its mechanisms unidentified.
By Kevin Murphy
arXiv:2609.07611v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Scientific ideation is the capacity to formulate novel and testable hypotheses from scientific evidence, and autonomous AI scientists depend on it. Exi...
By Yunxiang Mo, Tianshi Zheng, Yisen Gao, Rui Wang, Newt Nguyen Kim Hue Nam, Kelvin Kiu Wai Tam, Jiaxin Bai, Yangqiu Song, Ginny Wong, Simon See
arXiv:2605.26087v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Frontier LLMs now perform strongly across a wide range of physics evaluations, but it is hard to disentangle genuine reasoning from recall of...
By Matt L. Wiemann, Lindsay M. Smith, Peter Melchior, Siddharth Mishra-Sharma, Andrew Gordon Wilson, Pavel Izmailov, Carolina Cuesta-L\'azaro
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
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:2608.30165v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Scientific progress depends not only on finding solutions, but on learning the rules that explain why they work and using that understanding to desig...
By Arya S. Rao, Rodrigo I. Castro, Sager J. Gosai, Kenneth B. Hsu, Yasha Ektefaie, Shantanu Singh, Sangeeta N. Bhatia, Steven K. Reilly, Ryan Tewhey, Eric S. Lander, Pardis C. Sabeti
arXiv:2610.17740v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to discover scientific equations from experimental data. Such a discovery system has two parts that...
By Pengze Li, Jiaquan Zhang, Encheng Su, Yunbo Long, Zihang Zeng, Xinping Liu, Han Zhang, Junchi Yu, Shixiang Tang, Aoran Wang, Xi Chen
The paper introduces a framework for evaluating large language model agents by attempting to end‑to‑end reproduce published astronomy studies, separating execution from verification and distinguishing computational failures from methodological ambiguities. Applying this to fourteen papers—one from The Astrophysical Journal and thirteen from Nature—revealed that eleven contained ambiguities that prevented a uniquely specified reproduction path. In a controlled case study, twelve different analysis paths produced distance estimates ranging from 2.16 to 3.53 kpc, with only one matching the published value of ~2.70 kpc, demonstrating that matching outcomes does not guarantee that the agent has reconstructed the underlying reasoning.
whyItMatters":"The study shows that end‑to‑end reproduction can expose gaps in implicit scientific knowledge within AI systems, highlighting the need for better integration of causal relevance in LLM agents."
By Yuehui Wang, Xinyu Qi, Guirong Xue, Cheng Wang, Yangbin Xie, Xiaoyu Tang, Cong Sun
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: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