IRIS: Interactive Research Ideation System for Accelerating Scientific Discovery
Aniketh Garikaparthi, Manasi Patwardhan, Lovekesh Vig, Arman Cohan
Abstract
The rapid advancement in capabilities of large language models (LLMs) raises a pivotal question: How can LLMs accelerate scientific discovery? This work tackles the crucial first stage of research, generating novel hypotheses. While recent work on automated hypothesis generation focuses on multi-agent frameworks and extending test-time compute, none of the approaches effectively incorporate transparency and steerability through a synergistic Human-in-the-loop (HITL) approach. To address this gap, we introduce IRIS for interactive hypothesis generation, an open-source platform designed for researchers to leverage LLM-assisted scientific ideation. IRIS incorporates innovative features to enhance ideation, including adaptive test-time compute expansion via Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), fine-grained feedback mechanism, and query-based literature synthesis. Designed to empower researchers with greater control and insight throughout the ideation process. We additionally conduct a user study with researchers across diverse disciplines, validating the effectiveness of our system in enhancing ideation. We open-source our code at https://github.com/Anikethh/IRIS-Interactive-Research-Ideation-System.- Anthology ID:
- 2025.acl-demo.57
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations)
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2025
- Address:
- Vienna, Austria
- Editors:
- Pushkar Mishra, Smaranda Muresan, Tao Yu
- Venue:
- ACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 592–603
- Language:
- URL:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-demo.57/
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Aniketh Garikaparthi, Manasi Patwardhan, Lovekesh Vig, and Arman Cohan. 2025. IRIS: Interactive Research Ideation System for Accelerating Scientific Discovery. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations), pages 592–603, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- IRIS: Interactive Research Ideation System for Accelerating Scientific Discovery (Garikaparthi et al., ACL 2025)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-demo.57.pdf