Explore/framework/FirstResearch: Auditable Question Formation for LLM Scientific Discovery Agents
F

Yufeng Wang/FirstResearch: Auditable Question Formation for LLM Scientific Discovery AgentsUnknown

LLM systems for scientific discovery increasingly assist with ideation, literature synthesis, experiment planning, and report generation, but the first research question they propose can remain difficult to audit: it may sound plausible without exposing the mechanism, falsifier, or assumption that a scientist should inspect. We introduce FirstResearch, a first-principles research-question formation framework for scientific LLM agents whose core artifact is a structured Research Question Certificate. The certificate records primitive definitions, assumptions, a mechanism model, a tension or contradiction, a falsifiable hypothesis, a minimal decisive test, and a failure update rule, making the proposed question inspectable before downstream execution. On ten LLM-agent research topics, FirstResearch outperforms controlled prompt-level baselines inspired by AI co-scientist, Agent Laboratory, and AI Scientist-v2 under a primary DeepSeek-blind-judge protocol. A Gemini-2.5-Flash independent-judge rescore of the same 40 baseline packages preserves the system-level ranking, with FirstResearch scoring 4.86/5 versus 4.38/5 for the strongest baseline and Pearson agreement of 0.865 on average score. A one-repeat ablation checkpoint further suggests that the certificate-centered core is the strongest component: certificate-only scoring reaches 4.90/5 under DeepSeek and 4.88/5 under Gemini, while removing certificates drops below 1/5 under both judges. These results are preliminary and use LLM judges rather than human domain experts, but they support a narrow scientific-discovery claim: explicit derivation constraints are a promising mechanism for making LLM-generated scientific questions more auditable. Code, prompts, saved outputs, and reproduction scripts are available at https://github.com/louiswang524/FirstResearch.

framework
GitHubCompare
Refreshed 2mo ago
OverviewActivity52wAlternativesDocs
Stars0
Forks0
HF Downloads—30d
Last commit—
Refreshed2mo ago
Project healthUnknownNo activity data.
Production readinessResearch / EarlyBest for exploration and prototyping.
Risk notesUnknown licenseVerify license before production use.
AgentHub Score
55 / 100
Composite score from 6 signals. How we score →
Active project
55Score
Growth
40C
Activity
30C
Documentation
70C+
Maturity
45C
Community
42C
Production
58C
GitHub stars · 79 days observed0 not enough history
snapshots
Repository activity · 79 days observedReal snapshots from pushed_at
inactivepushed
2026-07-262026-10-14
Practical assessment
Should you use it?

✓ Best for

  • Multi-agent orchestration
  • Production agentic workflows
  • Stateful long-running tasks

◎ Strengths

  • Stable API
  • Active release cadence
  • Strong GitHub community

✕ Not ideal for

  • Simple single-step automation
  • Teams without Python/ML expertise

⚠ Watch-outs

  • Breaking changes between minor versions
  • Ecosystem lock-in if tightly coupled
Technical details
What's inside
Language—
License—
Sourcearxiv
Open source✗ No
Commercial use—
Docs—
Demo—

AgentHub Score

55
Score 55/100
Below average

Alternatives

O
OccuReward: LLM-Guided Occupant-Centric Reward Shaping for Demographic Equity in Grid-Interactive Buildings
0 · framework
55
C
CHAL: Council of Hierarchical Agentic Language
0 · framework
55
T
Think Twice, Act Once: Verifier-Guided Action Selection For Embodied Agents
0 · framework
55
S
Structuring agentic AI for HPC code modernization
0 · framework
55Compare all →

Recent activity

Latest commit ——
Indexed by AgentHub crawler2mo ago
Monitor for new releasesongoing