@inproceedings{liu-etal-2026-guide,
title = "{GUIDE}: Towards Scalable Advising for Research Ideas",
author = "Liu, Yaowenqi and
Meng, BingXu and
Pan, Rui and
Liu, Yuxing and
Huang, Jerry and
You, Jiaxuan and
Zhang, Tong",
editor = "Liakata, Maria and
Moreira, Viviane P. and
Zhang, Jiajun and
Jurgens, David",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = jul,
year = "2026",
address = "San Diego, California, United States",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.1984/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2026.acl-long.1984",
pages = "42813--42834",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-390-6",
abstract = "The field of AI research is advancing at an unprecedented pace, enabling automated hypothesis generation and experimental design across diverse domains such as biology, mathematics, and artificial intelligence. Despite these advancements, there remains a significant gap in the availability of scalable advising systems capable of providing high-quality, well-reasoned feedback to refine proposed hypotheses and experimental designs. To address this challenge, we explore key factors that underlie the development of robust advising systems, including model size, data reweighting, context length, confidence estimation, and structured reasoning processes. Our findings reveal that a relatively small model, when equipped with a well-compressed literature database and a structured reasoning framework, can outperform powerful general-purpose language models such as Deepseek-R1 in terms of acceptance rates for self-ranked top-30{\%} submissions to ICLR 2025. Moreover, when limited to high-confidence predictions, our system achieves an acceptance rate exceeding 90{\%} on the ICLR 2025 test set, underscoring its potential to significantly enhance the quality and efficiency of hypothesis generation and experimental design."
}<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<modsCollection xmlns="http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3">
<mods ID="liu-etal-2026-guide">
<titleInfo>
<title>GUIDE: Towards Scalable Advising for Research Ideas</title>
</titleInfo>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Yaowenqi</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Liu</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">BingXu</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Meng</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Rui</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Pan</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Yuxing</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Liu</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Jerry</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Huang</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Jiaxuan</namePart>
<namePart type="family">You</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Tong</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Zhang</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<originInfo>
<dateIssued>2026-07</dateIssued>
</originInfo>
<typeOfResource>text</typeOfResource>
<relatedItem type="host">
<titleInfo>
<title>Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)</title>
</titleInfo>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Maria</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Liakata</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Viviane</namePart>
<namePart type="given">P</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Moreira</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Jiajun</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Zhang</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">David</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Jurgens</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<originInfo>
<publisher>Association for Computational Linguistics</publisher>
<place>
<placeTerm type="text">San Diego, California, United States</placeTerm>
</place>
</originInfo>
<genre authority="marcgt">conference publication</genre>
<identifier type="isbn">979-8-89176-390-6</identifier>
</relatedItem>
<abstract>The field of AI research is advancing at an unprecedented pace, enabling automated hypothesis generation and experimental design across diverse domains such as biology, mathematics, and artificial intelligence. Despite these advancements, there remains a significant gap in the availability of scalable advising systems capable of providing high-quality, well-reasoned feedback to refine proposed hypotheses and experimental designs. To address this challenge, we explore key factors that underlie the development of robust advising systems, including model size, data reweighting, context length, confidence estimation, and structured reasoning processes. Our findings reveal that a relatively small model, when equipped with a well-compressed literature database and a structured reasoning framework, can outperform powerful general-purpose language models such as Deepseek-R1 in terms of acceptance rates for self-ranked top-30% submissions to ICLR 2025. Moreover, when limited to high-confidence predictions, our system achieves an acceptance rate exceeding 90% on the ICLR 2025 test set, underscoring its potential to significantly enhance the quality and efficiency of hypothesis generation and experimental design.</abstract>
<identifier type="citekey">liu-etal-2026-guide</identifier>
<identifier type="doi">10.18653/v1/2026.acl-long.1984</identifier>
<location>
<url>https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.1984/</url>
</location>
<part>
<date>2026-07</date>
<extent unit="page">
<start>42813</start>
<end>42834</end>
</extent>
</part>
</mods>
</modsCollection>
%0 Conference Proceedings
%T GUIDE: Towards Scalable Advising for Research Ideas
%A Liu, Yaowenqi
%A Meng, BingXu
%A Pan, Rui
%A Liu, Yuxing
%A Huang, Jerry
%A You, Jiaxuan
%A Zhang, Tong
%Y Liakata, Maria
%Y Moreira, Viviane P.
%Y Zhang, Jiajun
%Y Jurgens, David
%S Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
%D 2026
%8 July
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C San Diego, California, United States
%@ 979-8-89176-390-6
%F liu-etal-2026-guide
%X The field of AI research is advancing at an unprecedented pace, enabling automated hypothesis generation and experimental design across diverse domains such as biology, mathematics, and artificial intelligence. Despite these advancements, there remains a significant gap in the availability of scalable advising systems capable of providing high-quality, well-reasoned feedback to refine proposed hypotheses and experimental designs. To address this challenge, we explore key factors that underlie the development of robust advising systems, including model size, data reweighting, context length, confidence estimation, and structured reasoning processes. Our findings reveal that a relatively small model, when equipped with a well-compressed literature database and a structured reasoning framework, can outperform powerful general-purpose language models such as Deepseek-R1 in terms of acceptance rates for self-ranked top-30% submissions to ICLR 2025. Moreover, when limited to high-confidence predictions, our system achieves an acceptance rate exceeding 90% on the ICLR 2025 test set, underscoring its potential to significantly enhance the quality and efficiency of hypothesis generation and experimental design.
%R 10.18653/v1/2026.acl-long.1984
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.1984/
%U https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2026.acl-long.1984
%P 42813-42834
Markdown (Informal)
[GUIDE: Towards Scalable Advising for Research Ideas](https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.1984/) (Liu et al., ACL 2026)
ACL
- Yaowenqi Liu, BingXu Meng, Rui Pan, Yuxing Liu, Jerry Huang, Jiaxuan You, and Tong Zhang. 2026. GUIDE: Towards Scalable Advising for Research Ideas. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 42813–42834, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.