LigBench: A Unified and Human-Aligned Benchmark for LLM-based Research Idea Generation

2026-08-13

AI Summary

This work addresses the lack of a unified, objective, and human-aligned evaluation standard for scientific idea generation by large language models. To this end, the authors propose LigBench—an automated, fine-grained evaluation benchmark—and introduce the PAIR-IQ dataset to train pairwise idea judgment models, enabling consistent and interpretable assessment across diverse generation distributions. The framework pioneers a shift from subjective scoring to structured comparative learning, substantially improving alignment with expert judgments. Experimental results demonstrate that LigBench outperforms existing methods in evaluation stability and interpretability, with models trained on PAIR-IQ achieving superior performance in ranking accuracy and robustness.

Abstract

With the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs), research idea generation has attracted increasing attention. Existing approaches enable LLMs to retrieve relevant literature and propose novel ideas for research areas. However, current evaluation practices for idea generation remain fragmented and lack objective standards, often relying on direct LLM scoring, which limits their ability to provide unified and reliable assessments across a coherent distribution of generated ideas. To address this challenge, we propose LigBench, an automated evaluation benchmark that enables fine-grained and reliable evaluation of AI research ideas, consistently applicable across different generation distributions. In addition, we introduce PAIR-IQ, a dataset tailored for training pairwise idea judgment models and serving as an auxiliary reference to support more objective comparative evaluation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LigBench achieves stable and interpretable evaluations, significantly improving alignment with expert judgments. Furthermore, models trained on PAIR-IQ exhibit enhanced ranking accuracy and robustness, establishing a principled standard for scalable and objective research idea assessment.

Problem

• research idea generation
• evaluation benchmark
• large language models
• objective assessment
• human alignment

Innovation

• LigBench
• research idea generation
• PAIR-IQ
• human-aligned evaluation
• automated benchmark