arXiv · 2505.17873
MOOSE-Chem3: Toward Experiment-Guided Hypothesis Ranking via Simulated Experimental Feedback
Abstract
Hypothesis ranking is vital for automated scientific discovery, especially in cost-intensive, throughput-limited natural science domains. Current methods focus on pre-experiment ranking, relying solely on language model reasoning without empirical feedback. We introduce experiment-guided ranking, which prioritizes hypotheses based on feedback from prior tests. Due to the impracticality of real experiments, we propose a simulator grounded in domain-specific concepts that models hypothesis performance as a function of similarity to a hidden ground truth, perturbed by noise. Validated against 124 hypotheses with experimentally reported outcomes, the simulator approximates real results with consistent trend alignment. Although deviations exist, they mimic wet-lab noise, promoting more robust ranking strategies. We frame experiment-guided ranking as a sequential decision-making problem and propose an in-context reinforcement learning (ICRL) framework. Our LLM-based policy decomposes hypotheses into functional elements, clusters them by mechanistic roles, and prioritizes recombinations based on feedback. Experiments show our approach significantly outperforms pre-experiment baselines and strong ablations. Our toolkit, comprising the simulator and ICRL framework, enables systematic research on experiment-guided ranking, with the policy serving as a strong proof of concept.
Explore related subjects
Keep this discovery
Wanhao Liu, Zonglin Yang, Jue Wang, Lidong Bing, Di Zhang, Dongzhan Zhou, Yuqiang Li, Houqiang Li, Erik Cambria, Wanli Ouyang. 2025-05-23. MOOSE-Chem3: Toward Experiment-Guided Hypothesis Ranking via Simulated Experimental Feedback. https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.17873
Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.