Historical Backtesting for Scientific Question Discovery: A Protocol and Astronomy Pilot
Systems that generate scientific research questions are evaluated today by expert scores, LLM-as-judge ratings, or curated case studies -- all subjective, none falsifiable. We formalize historical backtesting as an alternative: a system generates questions from a corpus frozen at a historical cutoff, the questions are frozen before any access to later literature, and a temporally isolated future corpus then determines whether each question was subsequently answered, partially addressed, independently posed, or ignored, and whether its underlying premise was supported or refuted. The protocol is model-agnostic: any system that emits frozen questions can be scored. We release reproducible a...
| Authors | Hui Mao |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CE |
| Published | 17 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 17 August 2026 |
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