Paper Detail

IdeaAMBIG: Benchmarking Implementation-Critical Gaps in Research-Idea Specifications

Yiling Ma, Yilun Zhao, Sihong Wu, Manasi Patwardhan, Arman Cohan

arxiv Score 11.2

Published 2026-09-09 · First seen 2026-09-10

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Abstract

A research idea may be novel, coherent, and scientifically plausible, yet its proposed method may remain insufficiently specified for faithful implementation. We study the codification readiness of implementation-facing research-method specifications, defined by whether they provide sufficient methodological information for a competent implementer or coding agent to construct the intended method without unsupported assumptions. We construct evidence-grounded specifications and their supported resolutions from papers, codebases, issue threads, and reproduction artifacts. We introduce IdeaAMBIG, a benchmark of 660 evidence-grounded instances: 163 real-world gaps from reproducibility reports and GitHub issues, and 497 controlled synthetic gaps injected into codification-ready references. IdeaAMBIG evaluates three capabilities: codification-readiness assessment, defect localization, and clarification action generation. Defect localization receives only the specification, whereas clarification additionally receives the annotated defect. Across 13 LLMs, the best model achieves 9.6% Macro Defect Recovery Rate on real-world instances but 80.6% Macro Clarification Action Success Rate when given the defect. In an oracle study, supplying the gold resolution raises the downstream codification-ready rate from 14% to 98%. Across all evaluated models, defect localization is the main bottleneck, with stronger clarification given the defect.

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BibTeX

@article{ma2026ideaambig,
  title = {IdeaAMBIG: Benchmarking Implementation-Critical Gaps in Research-Idea Specifications},
  author = {Yiling Ma and Yilun Zhao and Sihong Wu and Manasi Patwardhan and Arman Cohan},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {A research idea may be novel, coherent, and scientifically plausible, yet its proposed method may remain insufficiently specified for faithful implementation. We study the codification readiness of implementation-facing research-method specifications, defined by whether they provide sufficient methodological information for a competent implementer or coding agent to construct the intended method without unsupported assumptions. We construct evidence-grounded specifications and their supported re},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.10539},
  keywords = {cs.CL},
  eprint = {2609.10539},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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