Old Ideas, Novel Problems: The Instability of LLM-Based Novelty Evaluation

AI-based ideation systems are often evaluated on the novelty of their ideas, and that judgment is increasingly delegated to large language models. Such judges are typically built ad hoc and validated, if at all, on human-authored papers rather than on the generated ideas they are meant to score. So, how do novelty judges perform? Not well. We present a systematic controlled study of novelty evaluation design choices. We build an evaluation set automatically, mining OpenReview for passages where reviewers explicitly affirm or dispute a paper's originality and keeping only submissions with unanimous agreement at the extremes of their research area; we pair these with ideas from a vanilla LL...

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