2025/10/20 by Zhou, Jiawei, Zhu, Ruicheng, Chen, Mengshi +2
#FOS: Computer and information sciences #Multiagent Systems (cs.MA)
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2510.20844
Effective research relies on organizing extensive information and stimulating novel solutions. Agentic systems have recently emerged as a promising tool to automate literature-based ideation. However, current systems often remain black-box. Their outputs may appear plausible but weakly grounded, with limited transparency or control for researchers. Our work introduces TrustResearcher, a multi-agent demo system for knowledge-grounded and transparent ideation. Specifically, TrustResearcher integrates meticulously designed four stages into a unified framework: (A) Structured Knowledge Curation, (B) Diversified Idea Generation, (C) Multi-stage Idea Selection, and (D) Expert Panel Review & Synthesis. Different from prior pipelines, our system not only exposes intermediate reasoning states, execution logs, and tunable agents for inspections, but also enables the generation of hypotheses that are both diverse and evidence-aligned. Our design is also domain-agnostic: as long as literature sources exist, the same pipeline can be instantiated in any scientific field. As an illustrative case, we demonstrate TrustResearcher on a graph-mining case study (k-truss breaking problem), where it generates distinct, plausible hypotheses with evidence and critiques. A live demo and source code are available at https://github.com/valleysprings/TrustResearcher.