最小描述长度无监督区分自改进科学智能体中的定律级与统计级知识，并揭示其 86% 的发现仅为统计规律

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Abstract:AI systems that discover scientific relations now generate candidate "laws" at scale, but the bottleneck has shifted from generation to vetting: which candidates deserve belief? We show that a deployed self-improving science agent - one that has admitted 252 relations through held-out prediction courts - already computes the quantity that answers this question: the Minimum Description Length compression ratio used for model selection doubles, when read under discrete accounting, as an unsupervised epistemic grader. The compression-ranked top band of the agent's ledger recovers exactly the canonical laws among its discoveries (vis-viva across seven planets, Balmer/Rydberg) plus cross-measurement identities - enrichment $p=3.6\times10^{-12}$ under a hypergeometric test - with zero counterexamples and physically coherent band structure. The same lens retroactively reveals that 86% of the ledger compresses nothing ($\mathrm{cr}\approx 1$): the agent had been recording statistical regularities, including a learned predictor with held-out $R^2=0.541$ admitted through the prediction gate, under a narrative of compression as the unified value of knowledge - a narrative that was never true for them. We formalize the resulting dual-axis bookkeeping - prediction value ($R^2$) and compression value (cr) as nearly decoupled axes of knowledge - demonstrate its robustness to quantization, and register forward falsifiable predictions. The episode is, to our knowledge, the first measured instance of a discovery agent auditing its own knowledge ledger by an internal measure and finding itself over-claiming.

Submission history

From: Wenbin Mao [view email]
[v1] Fri, 23 Oct 2026 06:53:10 UTC (14 KB)