ResearchBench: Benchmarking LLMs in Scientific Discovery via Inspiration-Based Task Decomposition

摘要

Large language models (LLMs) have shown potential in assisting scientific research, yet their ability to discover high-quality research hypotheses remains unexamined due to the lack of a dedicated benchmark. To address this gap, we introduce the first large-scale benchmark for evaluating LLMs on a sufficient set of scientific discovery sub-tasks—inspiration retrieval, hypothesis composition, and hypothesis ranking—where sufficient means that perfectly solving these sub-tasks perfectly solves the overall discovery task. We develop an automated LLM-based framework that extracts critical components—research questions, background surveys, inspirations, and hypotheses—from papers across 12 disciplines, with expert validation confirming its accuracy. To prevent data contamination, we focus exclusively on publications from 2024 onward, ensuring minimal overlap with LLM pretraining data; our automated framework further enables automatic extraction of even more recent papers as LLM pretraining cutoffs advance, supporting scalable and contamination-free automatic renewal of this discovery benchmark. Our evaluation shows that, across disciplines, LLMs excel at inspiration retrieval—an out-of-distribution task—suggesting their ability to surface novel knowledge associations.