Towards Diverse Scientific Hypothesis Search with Large Language Models

Hugging Face Daily Papers Papers
large-language-models scientific-discovery hypothesis-generation evolutionary-search diversity multi-temperature-sampling

Summary

This paper proposes an evolutionary framework inspired by parallel tempering that uses multi-temperature sampling and information exchange to improve the diversity and quality of scientific hypotheses generated by large language models, demonstrated across molecular, equation, and algorithm discovery.

Large language models (LLMs) are on the rise for accelerating scientific discovery, most recently in advanced tasks such as generating valid scientific hypotheses. Yet in many discovery settings, the goal is not to identify a single best hypothesis since validation can be noisy and expensive, and scientists benefit from a set of high-quality alternative hypotheses that hedge against downstream uncertainty for the best solutions. Nevertheless, commonly used evolutionary search recipes tend to prioritize optimization over exploration in hypothesis generation, and the resulting selection pressure during the search process leads to diversity collapse. Motivated by these limitations, we formulate hypothesis search as a sampling problem, where the objective is to efficiently produce diverse, high-quality hypotheses under a fixed validation budget. Building on this perspective, we propose \ours, an evolutionary framework inspired by the classical parallel tempering algorithm that searches hypotheses at multiple temperature levels and enables principled information exchange across temperatures to improve exploration without disrupting convergence. Across domains including molecular discovery, equation discovery, and algorithm discovery, our approach consistently improves both hypothesis quality and diversity under the same validation budget, and produces candidates that remain robust under more expensive downstream computational validations.
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Paper page - Towards Diverse Scientific Hypothesis Search with Large Language Models

Source: https://huggingface.co/papers/2606.10587

Abstract

Evolutionary framework for hypothesis generation that improves diversity and quality through multi-temperature sampling and information exchange across search levels.

Large language models (LLMs) are on the rise for accelerating scientific discovery, most recently in advanced tasks such as generating valid scientific hypotheses. Yet in many discovery settings, the goal is not to identify a single best hypothesis since validation can be noisy and expensive, and scientists benefit from a set of high-quality alternative hypotheses that hedge against downstream uncertainty for the best solutions. Nevertheless, commonly usedevolutionary searchrecipes tend to prioritize optimization over exploration inhypothesis generation, and the resulting selection pressure during the search process leads todiversity collapse. Motivated by these limitations, we formulate hypothesis search as asampling problem, where the objective is to efficiently produce diverse, high-quality hypotheses under a fixedvalidation budget. Building on this perspective, we propose \ours, an evolutionary framework inspired by the classicalparallel temperingalgorithm that searches hypotheses at multiple temperature levels and enables principled information exchange across temperatures to improve exploration without disrupting convergence. Across domains including molecular discovery, equation discovery, and algorithm discovery, our approach consistently improves both hypothesis quality and diversity under the samevalidation budget, and produces candidates that remain robust under more expensive downstreamcomputational validations.

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