MoRI: Learning Motivation-Grounded Reasoning for Scientific Ideation in Large Language Models
Chenyang Gu East China Normal University, Jiahao Cheng, Meicong Zhang, Pujun Zheng East China Normal University, Jinquan Zheng, Guoxiu He East China Normal University
原文摘要
Scientific ideation aims to propose novel solutions within a given scientific context. Existing LLM-based agentic approaches emulate human research workflows, yet inadequately model scientific reasoning, resulting in surface-level conceptual recombinations that lack technical depth and scientific grounding. To address this issue, we propose \textbf{MoRI} (\textbf{Mo}tivation-grounded \textbf{R}easoning for Scientific \textbf{I}deation), a framework that enables LLMs to explicitly learn the reasoning process from research motivations to methodologies. The base LLM is initialized via supervised fine-tuning to generate a research motivation from a given context, and is subsequently trained under a composite reinforcement learning reward that approximates scientific rigor: (1) entropy-aware information gain encourages the model to uncover and elaborate high-complexity technical details grounded in ground-truth methodologies, and (2) contrastive semantic gain constrains the reasoning trajectory to remain conceptually aligned with scientifically valid solutions. Empirical results show that MoRI consistently outperforms strong commercial LLMs and complex agentic baselines across multiple dimensions, including novelty, technical rigor, and feasibility. The code is available on GitHub.
cs.CL · cs.AI
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表