Before the Action: Benchmarking LLMs on Prospective Hypothesis Discovery

arXiv:2607.15766v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) excel at answering pre-specified questions, yet their ability to navigate the open-ended, pre-conclusion stage of discovery remains largely unmeasured. We introduce Prospective Hypothesis Discovery (PHD), which asks models to autonomously construct grounded, discriminative, and testable hypothesis spaces from inconclusive evidence, including anomalous observations and fragmented records, to guide subsequent investigatio...