@inproceedings{chen-etal-2026-statefuldiscovery,
title = "{S}tateful{D}iscovery: Evidence-Calibrated Claim Formation in Open-Ended Scientific Discovery",
author = "Chen, Jiayao and
Liu, Shi and
Yang, Linyi",
editor = "Lee, Hung-Yi and
Dev, Sunipa and
Li, Jessy and
Elliott, Desmond",
booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {EMNLP} 2026",
month = oct,
year = "2026",
address = "Budapest, Hungary",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.665/",
pages = "13953--13977",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-462-0",
abstract = "Open-ended scientific discovery asks agents to move beyond executing analyses for predefined questions. Across multiple rounds of exploration, a discovery agent must decide which phenomena warrant investigation while avoiding overinterpretation, where emerging claims exceed the evidential scope of the analyses. This creates an evidence-calibration problem: the exploration trajectory must be coupled with claim status so that evidence can guide both what to investigate next and what can be claimed. We introduce StatefulDiscovery, a discovery framework that externalizes investigation state and uses it to coordinate frontier selection, evidence acquisition, and claim adjudication. We evaluate StatefulDiscovery across 40 real-data discovery tasks. Compared with several baselines, StatefulDiscovery produces more claims overall judged to be both well-supported and high-value. Ablations indicate distinct roles for structured hypotheses, local adjudication, frontier control and persistent states. Together, these results suggest that explicit discovery state can couple exploration with evidence-calibrated claim formation."
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<abstract>Open-ended scientific discovery asks agents to move beyond executing analyses for predefined questions. Across multiple rounds of exploration, a discovery agent must decide which phenomena warrant investigation while avoiding overinterpretation, where emerging claims exceed the evidential scope of the analyses. This creates an evidence-calibration problem: the exploration trajectory must be coupled with claim status so that evidence can guide both what to investigate next and what can be claimed. We introduce StatefulDiscovery, a discovery framework that externalizes investigation state and uses it to coordinate frontier selection, evidence acquisition, and claim adjudication. We evaluate StatefulDiscovery across 40 real-data discovery tasks. Compared with several baselines, StatefulDiscovery produces more claims overall judged to be both well-supported and high-value. Ablations indicate distinct roles for structured hypotheses, local adjudication, frontier control and persistent states. Together, these results suggest that explicit discovery state can couple exploration with evidence-calibrated claim formation.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T StatefulDiscovery: Evidence-Calibrated Claim Formation in Open-Ended Scientific Discovery
%A Chen, Jiayao
%A Liu, Shi
%A Yang, Linyi
%Y Lee, Hung-Yi
%Y Dev, Sunipa
%Y Li, Jessy
%Y Elliott, Desmond
%S Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
%D 2026
%8 October
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Budapest, Hungary
%@ 979-8-89176-462-0
%F chen-etal-2026-statefuldiscovery
%X Open-ended scientific discovery asks agents to move beyond executing analyses for predefined questions. Across multiple rounds of exploration, a discovery agent must decide which phenomena warrant investigation while avoiding overinterpretation, where emerging claims exceed the evidential scope of the analyses. This creates an evidence-calibration problem: the exploration trajectory must be coupled with claim status so that evidence can guide both what to investigate next and what can be claimed. We introduce StatefulDiscovery, a discovery framework that externalizes investigation state and uses it to coordinate frontier selection, evidence acquisition, and claim adjudication. We evaluate StatefulDiscovery across 40 real-data discovery tasks. Compared with several baselines, StatefulDiscovery produces more claims overall judged to be both well-supported and high-value. Ablations indicate distinct roles for structured hypotheses, local adjudication, frontier control and persistent states. Together, these results suggest that explicit discovery state can couple exploration with evidence-calibrated claim formation.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.665/
%P 13953-13977
Markdown (Informal)
[StatefulDiscovery: Evidence-Calibrated Claim Formation in Open-Ended Scientific Discovery](https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.665/) (Chen et al., Findings 2026)
ACL