Doug Downey
Publications
PreScience: A Benchmark for Forecasting Scientific Contributions
Can AI systems trained on the scientific record up to a fixed point in time forecast the scientific advances that follow? Such a capability could help researchers identify collaborators and impactful research directions, and anticipate which problems and methods will become central next. We introduce PreScience -- a scientific forecasting benchmark that decomposes the research process into four interdependent generative tasks: collaborator prediction, prior work selection, contribution generation, and impact prediction. PreScience is a carefully curated dataset of 98K recent AI-related research papers, featuring disambiguated author identities, temporally aligned scholarly metadata, and a structured graph of companion author publication histories and citations spanning 502K total papers. We develop baselines and evaluations for each task, including LACERScore, a novel LLM-based measure of contribution similarity that outperforms previous metrics and approximates inter-annotator agreement. We find substantial headroom remains in each task -- e.g. in contribution generation, frontier LLMs achieve only moderate similarity to the ground-truth (GPT-5, averages 5.6 on a 1-10 scale). When composed into a 12-month end-to-end simulation of scientific production, the resulting synthetic corpus is systematically less diverse and less novel than human-authored research from the same period.
Generating Literature-Driven Scientific Theories at Scale
Contemporary automated scientific discovery has focused on agents for generating scientific experiments, while systems that perform higher-level scientific activities such as theory building remain underexplored. In this work, we formulate the problem of synthesizing theories consisting of qualitative and quantitative laws from large corpora of scientific literature. We study theory generation at scale, using 13.7k source papers to synthesize 2.9k theories, examining how generation using literature-grounding versus parametric knowledge, and accuracy-focused versus novelty-focused generation objectives change theory properties. Our experiments show that, compared to using parametric LLM memory for generation, our literature-supported method creates theories that are significantly better at both matching existing evidence and at predicting future results from 4.6k subsequently-written papers