Idea2Plan: Exploring AI-Powered Research Planning

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant potential to accelerate scientific discovery as valuable tools for analyzing data, generating hypotheses, and supporting innovative approaches in various scientific fields. In this work, we investigate how LLMs can handle the transition from conceptual research ideas to well-structured research plans. Effective research planning not only supports scientists in advancing their research but also represents a crucial capability for the development of autonomous research agents. Despite its importance, the field lacks a systematic understanding of LLMs' research planning capability. To rigorously measure this capability, we introduce the Idea2Plan task and Idea2Plan Bench, a set of benchmarks built from ICML 2025 and Nature Mental Health papers released after major LLM training cutoffs. Each benchmark instance includes a research idea and a grading rubric capturing the key components of valid plans. We further propose Idea2Plan JudgeEval, a complementary benchmark to assess the reliability of LLM-based judges against expert annotations. Experimental results show that GPT-5 achieves the strongest performance on the benchmark, though substantial headroom remains for improvement. Our study provides new insights into LLMs' capability for research planning and lays the groundwork for future progress.