用质量多样性搜索生成更优科研想法,避免重复或平庸。
IDEAgent: Agentic Quality-Diversity Search for Research Idea Generation

- 多智能体框架通过谱系演化管理想法,兼顾质量和多样性。
- 在32个计算机科学主题中,性能比基线高3.89倍,覆盖主题多8倍。
- 适合需要创新且逻辑严谨的研究者,开源可复现。
近年来,大语言模型显著加速了科学发现过程。然而,现有系统普遍存在单一优化目标的局限:要么追求高质量,要么追求多样性,导致生成的想法彼此接近,或产生大量平庸、不合理或模糊的概念。本文提出将科研选题视为质量与多样性协同优化的问题,构建IDEAgent——一个基于多智能体的框架,通过谱系追踪机制演化想法。利用多目标反馈进行针对性修复与优化以提升质量,同时通过轻量级序列记忆和与已完成、历史及被拒方案的显式对比实现多样性。为系统评估,设计了Yield指标,衡量满足质量阈值的最大互异想法集合。在涵盖8个计算机科学领域的32个主题上,IDEAgent相比最佳基线提升3.89倍,且在8倍更多主题上获得非零Yield。分析表明,修复与精炼对增强逻辑严谨性和清晰度至关重要,同时保持思想新颖性。代码已开源,推动基于质量-多样性搜索的科研创新研究。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly automated the process of scientific discovery over the past few years. However, existing systems share one core limitation: they generate and optimize ideas independently for either Quality or Diversity. This often leads to the generation of ideas in close proximity to one another or to a large set of trivial, unsound, or unclear concepts. In this work, we instead argue that research ideation should be treated as a conjunction of both objectives and framed as a Quality-Diversity (QD) search. In line with this perspective, we introduce IDEAgent, a multi-agent framework that manages the evolution of ideas through lineages. We jointly drive Quality using multi-objective feedback for dedicated repair and refinement, while Diversity is achieved through lightweight sequential memory and explicit comparison against completed ideas, their historical ancestors, and rejected proposals. To systematically evaluate this QD conjunction, we develop Yield, a joint metric that computes the largest set of mutually diverse ideas that satisfy a predetermined quality threshold. Finally, through evaluations across 32 topics spanning 8 domains of Computer Science, we show that IDEAgent outperforms the best baseline by 3.89x on Yield, while achieving non-zero Yield on 8x more topics. We further corroborate these findings through an analysis of quality improvements, showing that repair and refinement are crucial for building logical rigor and clarity while preserving non-obviousness. To encourage future research on QD-search-based ideation, we open-source IDEAgent at https://github.com/declare-lab/IDEAgent.
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