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
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-demo.57/
DOI:
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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)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-demo.57.pdf
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 2025.acl-demo.57.copyright_agreement.pdf