FlowPIE: Test-Time Scientific Idea Evolution with Flow-Guided Literature Exploration

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence [Submitted on 31 Mar 2026] FlowPIE: Test-Time Scientific Idea Evolution with Flow-Guided Literature Exploration Qiyao Wang, Hongbo Wang, Longze Chen, Zhihao Yang, Guhong Chen, Hamid Alinejad-Rokny, Hui Li, Yuan Lin, Min Yang Scientific idea generation (SIG) is critical to AI-driven autonomous research, yet existing approaches are often constrained by a static retrieval-then-generation paradigm, leading to homogeneous and insufficiently divergent ideas. In this work, we propose FlowPIE, a tightly coupled retrieval-generation framework that treats literature exploration and idea generation as a co-evolving process. FlowPIE expands literature trajectories via a flow-guided Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) inspired by GFlowNets, using the quality of current ideas assessed by an LLM-based generative reward model (GRM) as a supervised signal to guide adaptive retrieval and construct a diverse, high-quality initial population. Based on this population, FlowPIE models idea generation as a test-time idea evolution process, applying selection, crossover, and mutation with the isolation island paradigm and GRM-based fitness computation to incorporate cross-domain knowledge. It effectively mitigates the information cocoons arising from over-reliance on parametric knowledge and static literature. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that FlowPIE consistently produces ideas with higher novelty, feasibility and diversity compared to strong LLM-based and agent-based frameworks, while enabling reward scaling during test time. Comments: 30 pages, 11 figures, 15 tables Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computation and Language (cs.CL) Cite as: arXiv:2603.29557 [cs.AI]   (or arXiv:2603.29557v1 [cs.AI] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.29557 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Qiyao Wang [view email] [v1] Tue, 31 Mar 2026 10:37:47 UTC (1,987 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-03 Change to browse by: cs cs.CL References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)