ResearchTown: Simulator of Human Research Community
Authors: name: Haofei Yu, name: Zhaochen Hong, name: Zirui Cheng, name: Kunlun Zhu, name: Keyang Xuan, name: Jinwei Yao, name: Tao Feng, name: Jiaxuan You

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential in
scientific domains, yet a fundamental question remains unanswered: Can we
simulate human research communities with LLMs? Addressing this question can
deepen our understanding of the processes behind idea brainstorming and inspire
the automatic discovery of novel scientific insights. In this work, we propose
ResearchTown, a multi-agent framework for research community simulation. Within
this framework, the human research community is simplified and modeled as an
agent-data graph, where researchers and papers are represented as agent-type
and data-type nodes, respectively, and connected based on their collaboration
relationships. We also introduce TextGNN, a text-based inference framework that
models various research activities (e.g., paper reading, paper writing, and
review writing) as special forms of a unified message-passing process on the
agent-data graph. To evaluate the quality of the research simulation, we
present ResearchBench, a benchmark that uses a node-masking prediction task for
scalable and objective assessment based on similarity. Our experiments reveal
three key findings: (1) ResearchTown can provide a realistic simulation of
collaborative research activities, including paper writing and review writing;
(2) ResearchTown can maintain robust simulation with multiple researchers and
diverse papers; (3) ResearchTown can generate interdisciplinary research ideas
that potentially inspire novel research directions.