innovation management teams

Abstract: Many scientific advances come from cross-pollination, carrying an idea from one field over to a problem in another. Yet retrieving papers across fields remains underexplored, with existing benchmarks confined to a narrow range of fields. We study cross-pollination retrieval, the problem of identifying transferable ideas across research fields, and introduce CPR-Dataset, a large-scale dataset constructed by mining cross-topic citations. Its evaluation split CPR-eval has 1,300 queries in 26 fields, and its training split CPR-train has 10,573 pairs. On CPR-eval, the best of eleven existing retrievers reaches a Recall@10 of only 0.26, whereas an LLM reranker reaches 0.81. Standard contrastive fine-tuning on CPR-train raises Recall@10 to as high as 0.70. The gain carries over to domains held out from training and to analogy and reasoning-intensive retrieval. On AnaloBench, it raises nDCG@10 by up to 33% over the untrained retriever, whereas training on three existing retrieval datasets lowers it. On BRIGHT, it raises nDCG@10 by up to 70%, more than twice the gain from those datasets. CPR-Dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/CPR-Dataset, and the code at https://github.com/SeokwonJung-Jay/Cross-Pollination-Retrieval.

Abstract: We evaluate language models' capability to generate novel research ideas through the lens of compression. We aim to lower-bound the potentially tiny probability that a language model generates the essence of a future research idea without any hints. Rather than estimate this probability through expensive repeated sampling, our Priced Guidance framework measures the compression cost: how many additional bits of information are needed to guide the model to recover the target idea. We prove that if the model can recover the target idea with at most K bits of guidance in expectation, then it can generate the idea without any guidance with probability at least $2^{-K}$. In our framework, the language model, called the generator, can pose a sequence of multiple-choice questions and specify a probability distribution over possible answers. A guide, which is a language model with access to the target idea, selects answers. If a selected answer has prior probability p, the generator pays $-\log_2 p$ bits. The generator aims to produce an idea that matches the essence of the target idea with minimal cumulative cost. This cumulative cost equals, up to an additive constant, the number of bits of information sent by the guide. Using this methodology, we evaluate five generator LLMs (Opus 5, Fable 5.1, GPT-6 Astra, GPT-5.6 Sol, and GLM 5.3) on the core ideas in 87 recent high-quality deep learning papers and we use LLM as judge to determine whether the generated idea matches the target in terms of the central research object and defining mechanism. Fable 5.1 achieves the lowest median compression cost at 69.9 bits, substantially lower than gzip's median of 5,712 bits for losslessly compressing the summary of the target idea. A uniform ensemble of Fable 5.1, Opus 5, and Astra further reduces the median compression cost to 55.8 bits and improves the generation probability lower bound by 18,000 times.