Human-LLM Compound System for Scientific Ideation through Facet Recombination and Novelty Evaluation

Understand

The scientific ideation process often involves blending facets of existing papers to create new ideas.

• We contribute Scideator, the first human-LLM system for facet-based scientific ideation.
• Starting from user-provided papers, Scideator extracts key facets -- purposes, mechanisms, and evaluations -- from these and related papers, allowing users to interactively recombine facets to synthesize ideas.
• Scideator is driven by three design choices: (1) human-in-the-loop facet recombination, in which users select facets from retrieved papers and the system generates ideas by finding analogies across them via the Faceted Idea Generator module; (2) distance-controlled retrieval via the Analogous Paper Facet Finder module, which surfaces papers ranging from the same topic to entirely different areas to provide a spectrum of directions; and (3) facet-based novelty verification via the Idea Novelty Checker module, a retrieve-then-rerank pipeline that helps users to evaluate idea originality using facets.