AI co-scientists have expanded the use of large language models for generating scientific hypotheses and guiding experimental investigation. Here we investigate whether temporal patterns in the semant...
The paper introduces a unified pre‑training framework for medical representations that incorporates hierarchical sub‑token aggregation, partial masking, and cross‑reference mechanisms to better capture the structure of medical codes. The resulting model outperforms existing BERT‑based approaches on pre‑training tasks and downstream clinical predictions, such as dementia onset and hospitalization. An in‑silico drug repositioning study for Alzheimer’s disease demonstrates the framework’s ability to rediscover known drugs and prioritize new hypotheses without external literature, establishing a workflow for hypothesis generation and prioritization based on observational data.
By Yuhei Fujioka, Daitaro Misawa, Shingo Fukuma
Hakken is a domain‑agnostic system that predicts and explains future scientific discoveries by combining transformer‑based models trained on temporal knowledge graphs with large language model semantic knowledge. It identifies novel relationships between scientific concepts that extend beyond the deductive hull of existing knowledge and provides explanations to help scientists assess these predictions. In the biomedical domain, Hakken set a new benchmark for time‑aware multi‑label relation prediction, generated 1.5 million high‑confidence hypotheses about aging, and experimentally confirmed two predictions that revealed previously undocumented interactions relevant to drug discovery.
By Tarek R. Besold, Uchenna Akujuobi, Pablo Sanchez, Alessandra Toniato, Kana Maruyama, Jihun Choi, Samy Badreddine, Frederick Gifford, Daniel Evans-Yamamoto, Sucheendra K. Palaniappan, Miquel Ferrer, Kae Nagano, Iris Rossell, Tom Joy, Hatem ElShazly, Chrysa Iliopoulou, Christoph Wehner, Thiviyan Thanapalasingam, Susana Nunes, Pedro G. Cotovio, Peter Wurman, Peter Stone, Hiroaki Kitano, Michael Spranger
The paper introduces EDB-Bio, a benchmark of 96,000 episodes drawn from real biological studies—drug‑perturbation transcriptomics, CRISPR screens, and GWAS—to test whether language models can weigh empirical evidence and predict hypothesis truth. Initial results show that both open‑weight and frontier models are systematically underconfident, matching a trivial base‑rate forecaster in Brier score, but post‑training with proper scoring rules improves calibration and discrimination. In a downstream experiment‑selection task, a calibrated model (Ibis0) outperforms the best frontier model by 2.5×, and Bayes‑factor analysis reveals how models update beliefs, align with expert relevance judgments, and expose biases.
By Conor Igoe, Gabriel Grand, Zane Koch, Albert Bou, Eli Moss, Michaela M. Hinks, Samuel G. Rodriques, Andrew White, Siddharth Narayanan
The paper "Medical Causal Hypothesis Verification with Large Language Models" reports a small-scale study evaluating eight LLMs on 17 medical causal hypotheses. The authors introduce an evaluation framework and annotate 1,067 evidence points across six criteria, using nine metrics to assess performance. Results show that while LLMs have strong recall, they frequently fail to provide valid scientific articles, evidence, or reject unsupported hypotheses, revealing a critical limitation for their use in healthcare.
By Safiyyah Ahmed, Abrar Ansari, Md Aminul Islam, Elena Zheleva
arXiv:2609.22174v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Anticipating emerging research directions is a critical goal of AI-assisted science. Existing methods mainly predict which concepts will co-occur in...
By Jingze Wang, Fred Sun, Shangqi Guo