StatefulDiscovery: Evidence-Calibrated Claim Formation in Open-Ended Scientific Discovery

# StatefulDiscovery: Evidence-Calibrated Claim Formation in Open-Ended Scientific Discovery
Source: [https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.11851](https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.11851)
[View PDF](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.11851)

> Abstract:Open\-ended scientific discovery asks agents to move beyond executing analyses for predefined questions\. Across multiple rounds of exploration, a discovery agent must decide which phenomena warrant investigation while avoiding overinterpretation, where emerging claims exceed the evidential scope of the analyses supporting them\. This creates an evidence\-calibration problem: the exploration trajectory must be coupled with claim status so that evidence can guide both what to investigate next and what can be claimed\. We introduce StatefulDiscovery, a discovery framework that externalizes investigation state and uses it to coordinate frontier selection, evidence acquisition, and claim adjudication\. We evaluate StatefulDiscovery across 40 real\-data discovery tasks\. Compared with several baselines, StatefulDiscovery produces more claims overall judged to be both well\-supported and high\-value\. Ablations indicate that structured hypotheses, local adjudication, and frontier control contribute to performance\. Together, these results suggest that explicit discovery state can couple exploration with evidence\-calibrated claim formation\.

## Submission history

From: Jiayao Chen \[[view email](https://arxiv.org/show-email/b7af9ecb/2606.11851)\] **\[v1\]**Wed, 10 Jun 2026 09:28:28 UTC \(2,709 KB\)