The Problem Is the Problem: Towards Scalable Mathematical Discovery

AI systems are increasingly capable of contributing to mathematical research. In research practice, frontier-model reasoning is a limited resource, and expert mathematical review is even more sharply constrained. Allocating these scarce resources well is therefore central to making AI-assisted mathematical discovery efficient. In most current AI-for-math workflows, human effort is concentrated at the beginning and end, in selecting suitable research problems and later reviewing the resulting artifacts. These two stages are becoming bottlenecks for research-level mathematics. We address them by proposing a new human-AI discovery paradigm. The human input is no longer a single problem selected in advance, but a research direction in which the experts have interest and expertise. The system then searches a broad literature corpus for candidate problems in that direction. Inspired by search and recommender systems, we build Find, Attempt, and Recommend (FAR), a literature-to-review cascade that automates the search for suitable problems and focuses human attention on artifacts that have passed several stages of filtering. In a combinatorics pilot, the pipeline starts from 5,245 combinatorics papers, recovers 6,453 candidate conjectures or open problems, and filters them to 4,717 apparently well-posed and still-open conjectures. Subsequent reasoning and automated triage stages surface 598 potential resolutions and select 77 items for author-team review. Among them, we identify many interesting discoveries, including results on conjectures and questions of Davies--Jenssen--Perkins--Roberts, Erdős--Straus, Ikenmeyer--Pak--Panova, and Lund--Saraf--Wolf. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of this new mode of human-AI collaboration for mathematical discovery.

Large language model-assisted discovery of cohorts from scientific literature

Background: Planning multi-study analyses requires identifying cohorts with the relevant participants, phenotypes, and data modalities. This process commonly relies on prior knowledge, cohort catalogues, and manual literature searches. We developed a complementary question-driven framework that searches relevant scientific literature and extracts explicit cohort names. Methods: The framework first generates multiple PubMed queries from configurable vocabularies and templates and retrieves the resulting scientific literature automatically through the PubMed API. A large language model then screens the retrieved titles and abstracts and extracts explicit cohort names using a prompt tailored to the research question. The extracted names are deduplicated with human review. Configurable code, prompts, and example outputs are available at https://gitlab.rz.uni-frankfurt.de/cap_molgenlab/literature-cohort-discovery. Evaluation: As a use case, we applied the framework to youth aggression genetics. From 5,400 generated PubMed queries, the framework retrieved 5,254 unique records and identified 188 candidate cohorts. Manual screening using predefined criteria, including participant age and genetic-data availability, retained 44 eligible cohorts. Automated LLM-based name extraction was within the agreement range of human annotators. We also searched four established cohort catalogues using the same research question. Their combined results contained 27 of the 44 eligible cohorts, while 17 were not returned by any cohort catalogue search. Conclusion: The framework converts research-question-specific vocabulary into screenable cohort inventories via a large, automated literature search. It can be adapted across populations, phenotypes, data modalities, and study designs, and provides a literature-based complement to curated cohort catalogues.

When AI Writes, Who Gets Cited? Evidence of Citation Monoculture Across Language Models

As language models move from drafting prose to running literature-search agents with tool calls, fabricated references are becoming easier to catch and constrain. The harder failure begins after every candidate is real: different models may still select the same narrow subset, producing citation monoculture without any single citation being wrong. We isolate this effect on 120 real papers. Eleven models from three vendors choose at most ten papers from uniformly random panels of thirty, with real titles and abstracts but fabricated authors, reassigned years, and hidden venues and citation counts. Each run is compared with indifferent selection on the same panel and realized budget. All eleven models concentrate sharply: the top decile receives 23.3-30.2% of citations against 15.6% under the null, one component explains 68-73% of variation across their preference maps, and cross-vendor agreement nearly matches within-vendor agreement. Formalizing the task as fixed-budget subset selection, we turn these patterns into identifiable mechanisms: an exchangeability bound rejects a mapless selector for every model, a spectral decomposition explains why the best cross-fitted mixture still retains 55% of the excess, and a rarity theorem predicts the recursive competition effect we verify within panels. Controlled paraphrase, content-slot crossover, and design resampling attribute about 90% of GPT-5 mini's map variance to paper content. Eight domain experts selecting from the same blinded panels under the same cap show no comparable shared preference, while model concentration persists in selection-only mode. Even when every reference is real and every paper is equally visible, current language models impose a common content-level filter on scientific attention. Equalizing retrieval or mixing vendors is therefore insufficient; the shared preference map itself must be changed.

AskChem: Claim-Centered Infrastructure for Chemistry Literature Synthesis

Chemistry literature synthesis often requires assembling specific findings scattered across many publications, yet existing literature-search systems primarily return ranked document lists. As a result, scientists and AI agents need to locate relevant information, verify their provenance, and assemble cross-paper answers manually. We present AskChem, a claim-centered infrastructure for cross-paper chemistry search. AskChem changes the unit of retrieval from the paper to the provenance-carrying claim: each paper is converted into atomic, typed claims, each grounded by a source DOI and a verbatim quote or an explicit evidence locator. Over this shared claim store, AskChem exposes complementary structures for search and synthesis: a stabilized faceted taxonomy for hierarchical retrieval and browsing, an evidence graph linking claims through relations, and an exploratory living taxonomy that situates indexed papers under scientific principles. AskChem currently indexes 2.4M claims from 147K papers and provides a web interface, as well as REST, SDK, and MCP access for AI agents. On AskChem-Bench, grounding a GPT-5.5 reader in AskChem yields 100% resolvable DOIs, compared with 88.3% without retrieval, and the highest citation density among five tested systems. AskChem is live at https://askchem.org.

Distribird: Literature-Informed Prior Distribution Design for Bayesian Model Calibration

Bayesian calibration of process-based models requires a prior distribution for each model parameter. Despite decades of methodological work, researchers almost always fall back on uniform priors. The main reason is that building informative priors from scientific literature is slow and needs both domain and statistical expertise. We present Distribird, an agentic web application that automates this process. Given a parameter name, physical description, and domain context, Distribird deploys a multi-agent pipeline that searches the literature, extracts and weights reported values by domain relevance, and fits a probability distribution via AIC model selection. When no literature is available, the system falls back to sensible uninformative alternatives, and clearly reports both the evidence behind and the confidence level of every prior it produces. It is designed for the problems where the models have physically interpretable parameters, where domain knowledge exists in the published literature. We evaluate the tool on 24~parameters across 10 scientific domains comparing three open-weight models (Qwen3.6 27B, Gemma 4 31B, Mistral Small 4 119B) with a single-prompt LLM baseline. On prior quality the full pipeline matches this baseline. Every prior is traced to the specific papers and values from which it was constructed; a built-in validity layer declines to produce priors for out-of-scope requests, whereas the single-prompt baseline returns confident but unfounded priors for them in 11 of 30~model-parameter cases; and every language-model call runs locally, so no parameter description or unpublished modelling detail is transmitted to a third-party LLM provider (only generated search terms reach the public literature databases). For scientific use, we argue these properties matter more than a marginal improvement in point-estimate accuracy.

ResearchStudio-Idea: An Evidence-Grounded Research-Ideation Skill Suite from ML Conference Outcomes

Large language models have made research ideation increasingly accessible, yet effective idea development requires more than generating candidate directions. Researchers must ground a problem in current literature, identify meaningful bottlenecks, differentiate from existing solutions, and evaluate risks before committing to implementation. We present ResearchStudio-Idea as a reusable skill suite for this first mile of research ideation. The suite includes Paper-Search, a standalone multi-source literature search skill; Scoop-Check, a standalone prior-art collision checker for novelty claims; and IdeaSpark, the end-to-end skill that composes evidence grounding, pattern-guided generation, collision retrieval, audit, and idea-card rendering into one workflow. IdeaSpark is constructed from a corpus of 1,947 machine learning conference papers collected from ICLR, ICML, and NeurIPS between 2021 and 2025, including Oral papers, a separately tracked high-citation subset, and rejected submissions. Analysis of these outcomes reveals 31 recurring ideation sub-patterns, consolidated into 15 reusable ideation patterns. Each pattern is operationalized as a structured card containing research contexts, bottleneck types, differentiation strategies, supporting precedents, and common failure modes. Given a research problem and an evidence bundle, IdeaSpark evaluates evidence readiness, reconstructs the surrounding research context, identifies unresolved bottlenecks, selects relevant patterns, instantiates one candidate direction, retrieves potentially conflicting prior work, and performs outcome-informed auditing. This workflow transforms reusable ideation patterns into traceable research proposals. Blind automated-judge evaluations show that IdeaSpark consistently produces stronger research proposals than no-skill and generic-skill baselines while maintaining competitive novelty.

Multi-Turn Agentic Scientific Literature Search via Workflow Induction

Scientific literature search often requires more than retrieving papers from a single query: users' intents are underspecified, preference-dependent, and evolve through interaction. Existing search agents typically rely on fixed pipelines or implicit language-only reasoning, making their search strategies difficult to control, inspect, and refine. We introduce PaperPilot, a multi-turn literature search agent that frames scientific search as workflow induction. Given an anchor paper and a user query, PaperPilot constructs an executable DAG of paper-search operators, including keyword search, citation expansion, filtering, scoring, reranking, and evidence extraction. User feedback is then used to refine both the query and the workflow itself. We train PaperPilot with supervised workflow imitation and preference optimization over controlled workflow corruptions. Experiments show that PaperPilot-9B improves over the base Qwen3.5-9B toolset agent under multi-turn interaction, increasing Hit@5 from 58.0 to 77.0, MRR from 47.5 to 59.4, and nDCG@10 from 26.8 to 32.5, while reducing workflow execution errors from 9.5% to 0%. These results show that explicit, editable search workflows provide an effective and controllable interface for aligning literature search agents with complex scientific intent.