Measuring the Creativity of Frontier LLMs in Automated Research

2026-09-24T14:02:34.369Z

• summary: Frontier LLMs are increasingly capable of conducting automated research, yet their creativity in this setting has not been systematically evaluated. In this paper, we propose a set of metrics to evaluate creativity along the two dimensions of valueness and novelty. Valueness assesses whether each proposed idea is useful, while novelty is evaluated from three perspectives: whether the same idea has appeared before (Exact-Match P-Novelty), whether a previously unexplored variable or variable combination is explored (Variable-level P-Novelty), and whether the idea directly follows retrieved exter → Frontier LLMs are increasingly capable of conducting automated research, yet their creativity in this setting has not been systematically evaluated. We propose a set of metrics to evaluate creativity along the two dimensions of valueness and novelty. Valueness assesses whether each proposed idea is useful, while novelty is evaluated from three perspectives: whether the same idea has appeared before (Exact-Match P-Novelty), whether the modified variable or variable combination has been explored before (Variable-level P-Novelty), which reflects the breadth of research-space exploration, and whet