cs.AINov 10, 2026

Contrastive Discovery: Open-Ended Scientific Discovery over Competing Explanations

Authors: Ziang Liu, James J. Kim, Yijia Dai, Jennifer J. Sun

Organizations: Department of Computer Science Cornell University

Abstract

LLM agents are increasingly used for open-ended, data-driven scientific discovery, yet most of them evaluate hypotheses pointwise, testing an empirical claim hh only against its complement ¬h\neg h. When evidence rejects hh, the agent learns that one explanation is unlikely but not which alternative the evidence supports. To recover that alternative, we introduce Contrastive Discovery, which replaces the single hypothesis with a contrast set, a scientific question paired with mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive competing explanations. Each experiment is scored by how its evidence redistributes belief across the set, and the question is resolved when belief concentrates on one explanation. Because contrast sets change only the unit an agent proposes and scores, an existing agent can use them to re-evaluate evidence it has already collected or to guide its search. Across six domains, 89%89\% of the pointwise candidates with the largest belief shifts are rejections. On the same evidence, contrast sets resolve 73%73\% of these candidates to a specific alternative. When contrast sets guide search, the agent resolves 67%67\% more questions than pointwise surprisal under the same experiment budget. In a blinded study, 3838 human experts chose the same explanation on 78%78\% of resolved questions and on 82%82\% of questions where the pointwise agent rejected its hypothesis and stopped. Together, these results support explicit competing explanations as a way for discovery agents to resolve more scientific questions from the same evidence and validation budget.

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