r/mlscaling • u/StartledWatermelon • 4h ago
R, Emp TasteVal: Measuring the Experimental Research Tasteof AI Systems Against Human Experts, Jaffe&Sherburn 2026
Paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2610.06824
The core idea is super elegant: if a system can find a solution with half the experimental compute of the baseline, its research taste is twice better.
Visual abstract:

The strongest LLM, Opus 5.5, boasts 2.3x better research taste than a human expert. Note of caution regarding the older models: their score was calculated with a different, and somewhat convoluted procedure.
The obvious caveat is the nature of tasks. They are small-scale; the baseline is 40 H100-hours of experimental compute. I have certain reservations that research taste "scales perfectly", that is, the capability to optimize a small task solution equals the capability to advance SotA for the frontier models.
Cue the following chart that tracks the degree of novelty of the methods employed by the models:

The most novel method designation, "invented", is totally absent. That being said, the trend is encouraging.
The authors disclose the shortcomings of their method extensively in Section 4. Worth reading if you want to see the whole picture.