Recent studies have evaluated creativity, where novelty is an important aspect, of large language models (LLMs) primarily from a semantic perspective, using benchmarks from cognitive science. However, assessing the novelty in scholarly publications, a critical facet of evaluating LLMs as scientific discovery assistants, remains underexplored, despite its potential to accelerate research cycles and prioritize high-impact contributions in scientific workflows. We introduce SchNovel, a benchmark to evaluate LLMs’ ability to assess novelty in scholarly papers, a task central to streamlining discovery pipeline. SchNovel consists of 15000 pairs of papers across six fields sampled from the arXiv dataset with publication dates spanning 2 to 10 years apart. In each pair, the more recently published paper is assumed to be more novel. Additionally, we propose RAG-Novelty, a retrieval-augmented method that mirrors human peer review by grounding novelty assessment in retrieved context. Extensive experiments provide insights into the capabilities of different LLMs to assess novelty and demonstrate that RAG-Novelty outperforms recent baseline models highlight LLMs’ promise as tools for automating novelty detection in scientific workflows.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently been applied to reranking tasks in information retrieval, achieving strong performance. However, their high computational demands often hinder practical deployment.Existing studies evaluate the efficiency of LLM-based rerankers using proxy metrics such as latency, the number of forward passes, input tokens, and output tokens. However, these metrics depend on hardware and running-time choices (parallel or not, batch size, etc), and often fail to account for model size, making it difficult to interpret and obscuring the evaluation of the efficiency-effectiveness tradeoff. To address this issue, we propose for LLM-based rerankers: RPP (ranking metrics per PetaFLOP), measuring how much ranking quality (e.g., NDCG or MRR) a method achieves per PetaFLOP, and QPP (queries per PetaFLOP), measuring how many queries can be processed per PetaFLOP. Accompanied by the new metrics, an interpretable FLOPs estimator is developed to estimate the FLOPs of an LLM-based reranker even without running any experiments. Based on the proposed metrics, we conduct comprehensive experiments to evaluate a wide range of LLM-based rerankers with different architectures, studying the efficiency-effectiveness trade-off and bringing this issue to the attention of the research community.