arXiv:2605.14600cs.CL2026-05

构建科学发现路径预测基准,揭示科研进展的依赖关系。

SciPaths: Forecasting Pathways to Scientific Discovery

论文配图:SciPaths: Forecasting Pathways to Scientific Discovery
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 提出发现路径预测任务,逆向追踪目标成果所需的前置贡献。
  • 构建包含262条专家标注金路径和2444条银路径的数据集。
  • 发现模型在识别关键方法依赖时表现差,分解质量是主要瓶颈。

科学进步依赖一系列促成性贡献,但现有AI for Science评测多集中于引文预测、文献检索或创意生成,忽视推动进展的关键依赖关系。本文提出发现路径预测:给定目标科学成果及指定时间点的已有文献,任务为(1)识别实现该成果所需的前提贡献,(2)若存在,则将其与先前工作关联。我们构建了SciPaths数据集,包含262条专家标注的金路径和2444条由机器学习与自然语言处理论文生成的银路径,每条路径记录促成贡献、角色、理由及前序工作关联或未映射决策。评估前沿与开源语言模型发现,最佳模型在严格语义匹配下仅达0.189 F1,核心方法依赖最难恢复。当提供金路径中的促成贡献时,前序工作关联性能显著提升,表明分解质量是端到端路径恢复的主要瓶颈。SciPaths因此将评估重点转向科学预测中缺失的能力:从目标成果反推使其可行的科学基石与前序依赖。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Scientific progress depends on sequences of enabling contributions, yet existing AI4Science benchmarks largely focus on citation prediction, literature retrieval, or idea generation rather than the dependencies that make progress possible. In this paper, we introduce discovery pathway forecasting: given a target scientific contribution and the prior literature available at a specified time, the task is to (1) identify the enabling contributions required to realize it and (2) ground each in prior work when such prior work exists. We present SciPaths, a benchmark of 262 expert-annotated gold pathways and 2,444 silver pathways constructed from machine learning and natural language processing papers, where each pathway records enabling contributions, roles, rationales, and prior-work groundings or unmapped decisions. Evaluating frontier and open-weight language models, we find that the best model reaches only 0.189 F1 under strict semantic matching, with core methodological dependencies hardest to recover. Prior-work grounding improves substantially when gold enabling contributions are provided, showing that decomposition quality is a major bottleneck for end-to-end pathway recovery. SciPaths therefore shifts evaluation toward a missing capability in scientific forecasting: reasoning backward from a target contribution to the enabling scientific building blocks and prior-work dependencies that make it feasible.

科学发现路径预测因果推理

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