arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 27

Think-Probe-Respond: Improving Large Language Models as Judges of Research Idea Novelty

The paper introduces Think‑Probe‑Respond (TPR), a lightweight method to improve large language models’ ability to judge the novelty of research ideas. It identifies a systematic bias where models tend to label ideas as "medium novel" despite generating human‑like rationales, and shows that probing hidden states during reasoning and conditioning the final response on these probes boosts novelty judgment accuracy by 22.30%. TPR effectively reduces the medium‑novelty bias across strong baseline models.

By Tim Schopf, Tobias Schreieder, Akiko Aizawa