Oisin Mac Aodha
Publications
Autonomous Scientific Discovery via Iterative Meta-Reflection
Autonomous scientific discovery systems offer the potential to accelerate research by automating the process of hypothesis generation and validation. However, current systems operate within constrained search spaces or require predefined research questions, limiting their capacity for true open-ended inquiry. Furthermore, while they generate hypotheses iteratively, they largely lack the ability to explicitly synthesize their own accumulated findings to uncover complex, interconnected phenomena. We introduce DiscoPER, an autonomous large language model-powered framework that conducts open-ended research by dynamically generating and executing code to explore datasets without pre-specified research objectives. To ensure rigorous scientific validity, every proposed discovery must pass statistical testing. To overcome the limitations of isolated search, our framework introduces a second-order reasoning mechanism that periodically analyzes its own accumulated discoveries. By treating prior discoveries as empirical data, DiscoPER identifies structural patterns, confounds, and epistemic gaps, actively redirecting hypothesis exploration toward uncharted regions of the search space. The search space is further expanded by incorporating tool use, enabling the system to explore hypotheses beyond structured metadata by seamlessly processing and extracting useful information from multimodal sources like images. Evaluated on iNatDisco, a new multimodal ecological knowledge benchmark with pattern-level ground truth obtained from peer-reviewed literature, DiscoPER recovers 8 of 9 known patterns with a 72.7% hypothesis support rate, outperforming both classical causal discovery and LLM-guided baselines. Ablations show that DiscoPER scales with more data, and confirms the benefits of second-order meta-reflection.
APRES: An Agentic Paper Revision and Evaluation System
Scientific discoveries must be communicated clearly to realize their full potential. Without effective communication, even the most groundbreaking findings risk being overlooked or misunderstood. The primary way scientists communicate their work and receive feedback from the community is through peer review. However, the current system often provides inconsistent feedback between reviewers, ultimately hindering the improvement of a manuscript and limiting its potential impact. In this paper, we introduce a novel method APRES powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) to update a scientific papers text based on an evaluation rubric. Our automated method discovers a rubric that is highly predictive of future citation counts, and integrate it with APRES in an automated system that revises papers to enhance their quality and impact. Crucially, this objective should be met without altering the core scientific content. We demonstrate the success of APRES, which improves future citation prediction by 19.6% in mean averaged error over the next best baseline, and show that our paper revision process yields papers that are preferred over the originals by human expert evaluators 79% of the time. Our findings provide strong empirical support for using LLMs as a tool to help authors stress-test their manuscripts before submission. Ultimately, our work seeks to augment, not replace, the essential role of human expert reviewers, for it should be humans who discern which discoveries truly matter, guiding science toward advancing knowledge and enriching lives.
MotionPhysics: Learnable Motion Distillation for Text-Guided Simulation
Accurately simulating existing 3D objects and a wide variety of materials often demands expert knowledge and time-consuming physical parameter tuning to achieve the desired dynamic behavior. We introduce MotionPhysics, an end-to-end differentiable framework that infers plausible physical parameters from a user-provided natural language prompt for a chosen 3D scene of interest, removing the need for guidance from ground-truth trajectories or annotated videos. Our approach first utilizes a multimodal large language model to estimate material parameter values, which are constrained to lie within plausible ranges. We further propose a learnable motion distillation loss that extracts robust motion priors from pretrained video diffusion models while minimizing appearance and geometry inductive biases to guide the simulation. We evaluate MotionPhysics across more than thirty scenarios, including real-world, human-designed, and AI-generated 3D objects, spanning a wide range of materials such as elastic solids, metals, foams, sand, and both Newtonian and non-Newtonian fluids. We demonstrate that MotionPhysics produces visually realistic dynamic simulations guided by natural language, surpassing the state of the art while automatically determining physically plausible parameters. The code and project page are available at: https://wangmiaowei.github.io/MotionPhysics.github.io/.