Transforming Science with Large Language Models: A Survey on AI-assisted Scientific Discovery, Experimentation, Content Generation, and Evaluation

Understand

With the advent of large multimodal language models, science is now at a threshold of an AI-based technological transformation.

• An emerging ecosystem of models and tools aims to support researchers throughout the scientific lifecycle, including (1) searching for relevant literature, (2) generating research ideas and conducting experiments, (3) producing text-based content, (4) creating multimodal artifacts such as figures and diagrams, and (5) evaluating scientific work, as in peer review.
• In this survey, we provide a curated overview of literature representative of the core techniques, evaluation practices, and emerging trends in AI-assisted scientific discovery.
• Across the five tasks outlined above, we discuss datasets, methods, results, evaluation strategies, limitations, and ethical concerns, including risks to research integrity through the misuse of generative models.