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Auteurs principaux: Mathur, Shray, Boscoboinik, J. Anibal, Tsai, Esther H. R., Yager, Kevin G.
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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Accès en ligne:https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10574
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author Mathur, Shray
Boscoboinik, J. Anibal
Tsai, Esther H. R.
Yager, Kevin G.
author_facet Mathur, Shray
Boscoboinik, J. Anibal
Tsai, Esther H. R.
Yager, Kevin G.
contents As artificial intelligence advances, models are not improving uniformly. Instead, progress unfolds in a jagged fashion, with capabilities growing unevenly across tasks, domains, and model scales. In this work, we examine this dynamic jaggedness through the lens of scientific idea generation. We introduce SciAidanBench, a benchmark of open-ended scientific questions designed to measure the scientific creativity of large language models (LLMs). Given a scientific question, models are asked to generate as many unique and coherent ideas as possible, with the total number of valid responses serving as a proxy for creative potential. Evaluating 19 base models across 8 providers (30 total variants including reasoning versions), we find that jaggedness manifests both across models and within models. First, in a cross-task comparison between general and scientific creativity, improvements in general creativity do not translate uniformly to scientific creativity, revealing divergent capability profiles across models. Second, at the prompt level, stronger models do not improve uniformly; instead, they exhibit high variability, with bursts of creativity on some questions and limited performance on others. Third, at the domain level, individual models display uneven strengths across scientific subfields, reflecting fragmented internal capability profiles. Finally, we show that this jaggedness can be harnessed. We explore mechanisms of inference-time compute, knowledge pooling, and brainstorming to combine models effectively and construct meta-model ensembles that outperform any single model. Our results position jaggedness not as a limitation, but as a resource, a structural feature of AI progress that, when understood and leveraged, can amplify LLM-driven scientific creativity.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_10574
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle LLM Jaggedness Unlocks Scientific Creativity
Mathur, Shray
Boscoboinik, J. Anibal
Tsai, Esther H. R.
Yager, Kevin G.
Artificial Intelligence
As artificial intelligence advances, models are not improving uniformly. Instead, progress unfolds in a jagged fashion, with capabilities growing unevenly across tasks, domains, and model scales. In this work, we examine this dynamic jaggedness through the lens of scientific idea generation. We introduce SciAidanBench, a benchmark of open-ended scientific questions designed to measure the scientific creativity of large language models (LLMs). Given a scientific question, models are asked to generate as many unique and coherent ideas as possible, with the total number of valid responses serving as a proxy for creative potential. Evaluating 19 base models across 8 providers (30 total variants including reasoning versions), we find that jaggedness manifests both across models and within models. First, in a cross-task comparison between general and scientific creativity, improvements in general creativity do not translate uniformly to scientific creativity, revealing divergent capability profiles across models. Second, at the prompt level, stronger models do not improve uniformly; instead, they exhibit high variability, with bursts of creativity on some questions and limited performance on others. Third, at the domain level, individual models display uneven strengths across scientific subfields, reflecting fragmented internal capability profiles. Finally, we show that this jaggedness can be harnessed. We explore mechanisms of inference-time compute, knowledge pooling, and brainstorming to combine models effectively and construct meta-model ensembles that outperform any single model. Our results position jaggedness not as a limitation, but as a resource, a structural feature of AI progress that, when understood and leveraged, can amplify LLM-driven scientific creativity.
title LLM Jaggedness Unlocks Scientific Creativity
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10574