Re-Search:通过双人提问游戏剖析大语言模型的研究构思过程
Re-Search: Dissecting LLM Ideation Through a Two-Player Questioning Game
Muhan Gao, Hangxiao Zhu, Xinqi Su, Yu Zhang, Daniel Khashabi, Kuan-Hao Huang
AI 速读 基于摘要
作者提出 Re-Search 基准,把研究构思改造成“二十问”式提问游戏,用来追踪大语言模型在二元反馈下逐步逼近论文核心想法的过程。
cs.AI
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Research ideation is iterative: researchers refine their ideas step by step based on feedback. Yet existing evaluations obscure this search process, making it difficult to understand how LLMs explore the space of research ideas and what limits their progress. We introduce Re-Search, which adapts the format of Twenty Questions to research ideation: given only the research problem of a published paper, a model must rediscover the paper's core idea by asking yes-or-no questions. Built from 200 ICML 2026 papers, Re-Search tracks how a model's idea evolves as it asks questions and receives binary oracle feedback, isolating ideation from execution. Across six recent LLMs, nearly all progress happens within the first 30 of 100 questions, which largely decide how the game ends; after that, most models plateau. Through controlled interventions on the candidate questions and the hypothesis space, we find that the bottleneck is generation, not judgment: models recognize a good idea or a good question when one is offered, but often cannot produce it on their own. We further analyze the ideation traces and find that models fail by either over-exploiting one direction or over-exploring too many. These findings point to concrete design principles for autoresearch systems: since models can judge candidates they cannot produce, enriching the search with externally sourced ideas and questions may be more effective than improving any single model's generation ability.