AInstein: Assessing the Feasibility of AI-Generated Approaches to Research Problems

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission22141 Authors

Keywords: Large Language Models, Scientific Discovery, Problem Solving, AI Evaluation

TL;DR: AInstein is a framework that extracts core research problems from papers and tests whether AI can serve as an engine for generating feasible scientific solutions.

Abstract:

language models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive capabilities across a wide range of tasks, yet it remains unclear whether such success reflects genuine reasoning or sophisticated recall.
We introduce **AInstein**, a framework for testing whether LLMs can generate valid solutions to AI research problems using only their pretrained parametric knowledge---without domain-specific fine-tuning, retrieval augmentation, or other external aids. Our approach extracts distilled problem statements from high-quality ICLR 2025 submissions, then tasks specialized solver agents with proposing and refining technical solutions through iterative critique loops, mimicking the cycles of proposal, review, and revision central to scientific inquiry. We evaluate AInstein on 1,214 ICLR papers stratified by acceptance tier (Oral, Spotlight, Poster), using an LLM-as-a-judge paradigm guided by a structured rubric, complemented by targeted manual checks. Performance is assessed with three metrics: Success Rate (does the solution address the problem?), Rediscovery (does it align with human-proposed methods?), and Novelty (does it yield valid, original approaches?). Our results reveal that while LLMs can rediscover feasible solutions and occasionally propose creative alternatives, their problem-solving ability remains fragile and highly sensitive to framing. These findings provide the first large-scale evidence on the extent to which LLMs can act as autonomous scientific problem-solvers, highlighting both their latent potential and their current limitations.

Primary Area: generative models

Submission Number: 22141