BackTrend: Evaluating Scientific Weak-Signal Prediction via Backward Reconstruction

2026-09-21

AI Summary

本文提出BackTrend方法，通过回溯重建来评估科学弱信号预测，解决了现有资源无法有效链接早期研究与成熟主题的问题。

Abstract

Scientific weak signals are early, low-visibility research directions that later become central to mature scientific topics, yet existing resources such as trend tracking, citation forecasting, and foresight reports rarely provide validated reference sets that link concrete early precursors to later paradigms. We introduce BackTrend, a retrospective benchmark in which, given a mature target topic and a temporal evidence constraint, systems must recover two types of precursors: problem-space signals, underrecognized research problems, and solution-space signals, emerging methods for known problems. BackTrend contains 25 mature target topics in artificial intelligence and machine learning and 66 human-validated weak signals, reconstructed from large-scale literature by grounding each candidate in its 2019-2024 publication-frequency trajectory. We evaluate frontier LLMs, RAG systems, and agentic research systems using semantic matching and coverage-based metrics. Current systems often generate plausible but misaligned precursors, exhibiting topic drift, granularity mismatch, near-miss matching, and incomplete coverage; the strongest system achieves only 10.1% F1, while Coverage10 reaches at most 18.5% of the reference signals. Our budget analyses show that additional retrieval and web-search evidence can improve performance up to a moderate budget, but does not by itself close the substantial performance gap.

Problem

• scientific weak signals
• trend tracking
• citation forecasting
• foresight reports

Innovation

• BackTrend
• scientific weak signals
• retrospective benchmark
• problem-space signals
• solution-space signals