AwesomeLit: Towards Hypothesis Generation with Agent-Supported Literature Research

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Xie, Zefei, Guo, Yuhan, Xu, Kai
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Xie, Zefei
Guo, Yuhan
Xu, Kai
author_facet Xie, Zefei
Guo, Yuhan
Xu, Kai
contents There are different goals for literature research, from understanding an unfamiliar topic to generate hypothesis for the next research project. The nature of literature research also varies according to user's familiarity level of the topic. For inexperienced researchers, identifying gaps in the existing literature and generating feasible hypothesis are crucial but challenging. While general ``deep research'' tools can be used, they are not designed for such use case, thus often not effective. In addition, the ``black box" nature and hallucination of Large Language Models (LLMs) often lead to distrust. In this paper, we introduce a human-agent collaborative visualization system AwesomeLit to address this need. It has several novel features: a transparent user-steerable agentic workflow; a dynamically generated query exploring tree, visualizing the exploration path and provenance; and a semantic similarity view, depicting the relationships between papers. It enables users to transition from general intentions to detailed research topics. Finally, a qualitative study involving several early researchers showed that AwesomeLit is effective in helping users explore unfamiliar topics, identify promising research directions, and improve confidence in research results.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_22648
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle AwesomeLit: Towards Hypothesis Generation with Agent-Supported Literature Research
Xie, Zefei
Guo, Yuhan
Xu, Kai
Human-Computer Interaction
Artificial Intelligence
There are different goals for literature research, from understanding an unfamiliar topic to generate hypothesis for the next research project. The nature of literature research also varies according to user's familiarity level of the topic. For inexperienced researchers, identifying gaps in the existing literature and generating feasible hypothesis are crucial but challenging. While general ``deep research'' tools can be used, they are not designed for such use case, thus often not effective. In addition, the ``black box" nature and hallucination of Large Language Models (LLMs) often lead to distrust. In this paper, we introduce a human-agent collaborative visualization system AwesomeLit to address this need. It has several novel features: a transparent user-steerable agentic workflow; a dynamically generated query exploring tree, visualizing the exploration path and provenance; and a semantic similarity view, depicting the relationships between papers. It enables users to transition from general intentions to detailed research topics. Finally, a qualitative study involving several early researchers showed that AwesomeLit is effective in helping users explore unfamiliar topics, identify promising research directions, and improve confidence in research results.
title AwesomeLit: Towards Hypothesis Generation with Agent-Supported Literature Research
topic Human-Computer Interaction
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.22648