FirstResearch: Auditable Question Formation for LLM Scientific Discovery Agents
LLM systems for scientific discovery increasingly assist with ideation, literature synthesis, experiment planning, and report generation, but the first research question they propose can remain difficult to audit: it may sound plausible without exposing the mechanism, falsifier, or assumption that a scientist should inspect. We introduce FirstResearch, a first-principles research-question formation framework for scientific LLM agents whose core artifact is a structured Research Question Certificate. The certificate records primitive definitions, assumptions, a mechanism model, a tension or contradiction, a falsifiable hypothesis, a minimal decisive test, and a failure update rule, making ...
| Authors | Yufeng Wang |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 6 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 28 July 2026 |
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