"Excuse me, may I say something..." CoLabScience, A Proactive AI Assistant for Biomedical Discovery and LLM-Expert Collaborations
Authors: Yang Wu, Jinhong Yu, Jingwei Xiong, Zhimin Tao, Xiaozhong Liu
Organizations: Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, MA, USA · University of California, Davis, CA, USA · Jiangsu University, Zhenjiang, Jiangsu, China
Abstract
The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into scientific workflows presents exciting opportunities to accelerate biomedical discovery. However, the reactive nature of LLMs, which respond only when prompted, limits their effectiveness in collaborative settings that demand foresight and autonomous engagement. In this study, we introduce CoLabScience, a proactive LLM assistant designed to enhance biomedical collaboration between AI systems and human experts through timely, context-aware interventions. At the core of our method is PULI (Positive-Unlabeled Learning-to-Intervene), a novel framework trained with a reinforcement learning objective to determine when and how to intervene in streaming scientific discussions, by leveraging the team's project proposal and long- and short-term conversational memory. To support this work, we introduce BSDD (Biomedical Streaming Dialogue Dataset), a new benchmark of simulated research discussion dialogues with intervention points derived from PubMed articles. Experimental results show that PULI significantly outperforms existing baselines in both intervention precision and collaborative task utility, highlighting the potential of proactive LLMs as intelligent scientific assistants.
Large language models (LLMs), have shown strong potential in scientific discovery, yet existing methods still face substantial challenges in the design of research workflows and multi-role collaboration mechanisms. To mitigate these issues, we propose EvoSci, a multi-agent scientific collaboration framework, which integrates bio-inspired evolution with knowledge graph modeling. To iteratively generate, evaluate, and refine research ideas, EvoSci incorporates multiple role-based agents, including mentor, researcher, and reviewer. By combining collaborative reasoning, shared memory, and evolutionary feedback, EvoSci significantly enhances the coherence and creativity of scientific exploration. Experiments on real-world research topics demonstrate that EvoSci significantly outperforms strong baselines in LLM-based structured peer-review and comparative ranking evaluations, achieving the highest overall peer-review score (ICLR 4.90) and top ranking (Top-10 = 54). These results suggest its superiority in both scientific idea generation and continuous discovery.
Large Language Models (LLMs) trained on extensive scientific research are increasingly integrated as assistants for scientific discovery. However, most research papers omit the fine-grained cognitive process of examining constraints, failed alternatives, and iterative decisions required to achieve the desired goal. Such cognitive processes are vital for real-world scientists working toward specific goals under constraints. In this paper, we show that LLMs, when trained to produce such cognitive traces, perform better as scientific discovery assistants than when trained solely on scientific literature. We propose COGTRL, a trajectory-level reinforcement learning framework that trains LLMs to emulate cognitively grounded reasoning by jointly optimizing cognitive traces and the scientific steps produced in an interleaved manner. Across two 3B-parameter models and two scientific domains (AI and Materials Science), COGTRL improves method quality by an average of 7.85 points over comparable 3B model baselines and achieves competitive performance relative to 70B parameter models. Moreover, analysis by domain experts shows a preference for methods generated by COGTRL over the baselines.
Large language models (LLMs) show remarkable potential in scientific hypothesis discovery. However, existing approaches face two critical limitations: they treat divergent exploratory search and convergent fine-grained refinement as isolated tasks, and they operate autonomously with little to no human guidance. We present MOOSE-Copilot, the first unified framework to bridge this abstraction gap through a formalized human-AI interaction (HAII) protocol. Our system empowers scientists to steer the generative process via three explicit signals: initial blueprints, inter-stage routing, and intra-stage feedback. Using an oracle-simulated evaluation in which an LLM provides idealized expert signals, we show that injecting these structured signals significantly outperforms purely autonomous baselines, characterizing the gains achievable under high-quality guidance. Furthermore, we build a web-based interface that turns the framework into a no-code workflow: researchers pose a question, watch the hypothesis search unfold as an interactive tree, and steer it by selecting hypotheses, routing between stages, and injecting feedback-no command-line agents required. This makes end-to-end hypothesis discovery directly accessible to interdisciplinary researchers.