AI Can Learn Scientific Taste
Abstract
Great scientists have strong judgement and foresight, closely tied to what we call scientific taste. Here, we use the term to refer to the capacity to judge and propose research ideas with high potential impact. However, most relative research focuses on improving an AI scientist's executive capability, while enhancing an AI's scientific taste remains underexplored. In this work, we propose Reinforcement Learning from Community Feedback (RLCF), a training paradigm that uses large-scale community signals as supervision, and formulate scientific taste learning as a preference modeling and alignment problem. For preference modeling, we train Scientific Judge on 700K field- and time-matched pairs of high- vs. low-citation papers to judge ideas. For preference alignment, using Scientific Judge as a reward model, we train a policy model, Scientific Thinker, to propose research ideas with high potential impact. Experiments show Scientific Judge outperforms SOTA LLMs (e.g., GPT-5.2, Gemini 3 Pro) and generalizes to future-year test, unseen fields, and peer-review preference. Furthermore, Scientific Thinker proposes research ideas with higher potential impact than baselines. Our findings show that AI can learn scientific taste, marking a key step toward reaching human-level AI scientists.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2603.14473,
title = {AI Can Learn Scientific Taste},
author = {Jingqi Tong and Mingzhe Li and Hangcheng Li and Yongzhuo Yang and Yurong Mou and Weijie Ma and Zhiheng Xi and Hongji Chen and Xiaoran Liu and Qinyuan Cheng and Ming Zhang and Qiguang Chen and Weifeng Ge and Qipeng Guo and Tianlei Ying and Tianxiang Sun and Yining Zheng and Xinchi Chen and Jun Zhao and Ning Ding and Xuanjing Huang and Yugang Jiang and Xipeng Qiu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.14473},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
44 pages, 4 figures