Kaiyue Wen(@wen_kaiyue):Can LLMs generate novel research ideas? We propose Priced Guidance to quantify this via compression! We lower bound P(LLM forecasts a future paper’s idea X). Instead of sampling ideas until X is matched, the LLM plays “20 Questions” to recover X, charging each hint by surprisal.

2026.10.06 16:01

Can LLMs generate novel research ideas? We propose Priced Guidance to quantify this via compression! We lower bound P(LLM forecasts a future paper’s idea X). Instead of sampling ideas until X is matched, the LLM plays “20 Questions” to recover X, charging each hint by surprisal.