Collaborative Principle Evolution via Evidence Transfer for Scientific Discovery

Yingming Pu, Hongyu Chen, Tao Lin

Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents promise to automate scientific discovery, yet exploring the vast hypothesis space remains costly. Existing principle-evolution methods accelerate this loop, but operate sequentially, which caps exploration breadth and wastes wall-clock time on challenging problems. To address this, we formulate collaborative scientific discovery as evidence transfer between parallel principle-evolution branches. We present COEVOLVE, which realizes this transfer through a coordination core over parallel branches. By integrating value-of-information-gated routing and context-discounted likelihood injection, COEVOLVE enables branches to collaborate through shared measurements while keeping their principle posteriors separate. Across six scientific-discovery tasks under a matched evaluation budget, COEVOLVE attains a mean solution quality of 66.5% versus 57.0% for single-branch principle evolution, with a 1.80x mean wall-clock speedup on the GPT-5.6-Terra backbone; on five auto-research tasks delegated to an autonomous research harness, it is the only arm whose mean stays above the published SOTA anchor on every task. These results establish when evidence…