Reconstruction: A Blind Benchmark for Recovering Research Ideas from Pre-Publication Bibliographies
Can a language model recover the true research idea of a published paper when given only that paper's pre-publication bibliography? We introduce Reconstruction, a blind idea-recovery benchmark that withholds the seed paper and all contemporaneous or future literature, and asks models to propose hypotheses that an independent large language model judge matches against the held-out ground-truth idea. A strict anti-leakage protocol-temporal citation cutoff, anonymous reference IDs, and frozen per-paper bibliographies, which prevents prompt-time leakage of the seed idea. Across six scientific doma
