HindSight: Evaluating LLM-Generated Research Ideas via Future Impact

Abstract

Evaluating AI-generated research ideas typically relies on LLM judges or human panels -- both subjective and disconnected from actual research impact. We introduce HindSight, a time-split evaluation framework that measures idea quality by matching generated ideas against real future publications and scoring them by citation impact and venue acceptance. Using a temporal cutoff~$T$, we restrict an idea generation system to pre-$T$ literature, then evaluate its outputs against papers published in the subsequent 30 months. Experiments across 10 AI/ML research topics reveal a striking disconnect: LLM-as-Judge finds no significant difference between retrieval-augmented and vanilla idea generation ($p=0.584$), while HindSight shows the retrieval-augmented system produces 2.5$\times$ higher-scoring ideas ($p<0.001$). Moreover, HindSight scores are \emph{negatively} correlated with LLM-judged novelty ($\ddot{I}=-0.29$, $p<0.01$), suggesting that LLMs systematically overvalue novel-sounding ideas that never materialize in real research.