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arXiv · 2605.30329

SoundnessBench: Can Your AI Scientist Really Tell Good Research Ideas from Bad Ones?

Sy-Tuyen Ho·Minghui Liu·Huy Nghiem·Furong Huang
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Abstract

Autonomous AI research agents aim to accelerate scientific discovery by automating the research pipeline, from hypothesis generation to peer review. However, existing benchmarks rarely test a fundamental bottleneck: whether Large Language Models can judge the methodological viability of a research idea before expending time and computational resources. We introduce SoundnessBench, a curated benchmark of 1,099 machine-learning research proposals reconstructed from ICLR submissions, labeled with reviewer soundness sub-scores, and audited against source papers. SoundnessBench should be interpreted as a benchmark for recoverable proposal-stage soundness rather than exact prediction of full-paper review outcomes. Across 12 frontier LLMs, we find a pervasive optimism bias: under standard prompting, models frequently rate low-soundness proposals as sound, while aggressive prompting largely shifts errors from false positives to false negatives. Additional controls for public-corpus contamination, paper-identifying phrases, surface features, and human audit quality suggest that this behavior is not explained by a single confounder. Our results indicate that current LLMs are not yet reliable as standalone first-gate evaluators for scientific rigor.

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Sy-Tuyen Ho, Minghui Liu, Huy Nghiem, Furong Huang. 2026-05-28. SoundnessBench: Can Your AI Scientist Really Tell Good Research Ideas from Bad Ones?. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.30329

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