Continuous Knowledge Metabolism: Generating Scientific Hypotheses from Evolving Literature
About
Identifying promising research directions in fast-moving subareas is one of the most cognitively expensive tasks in modern AI research. Existing LLM-driven scientific discovery systems are typically limited to one-shot prompting on static literature snapshots and are validated only against contemporary judges such as human reviewers, agent peer review, wet-lab assays, or self-evaluation, leaving open whether they can anticipate future trends. We present Continuous Knowledge Metabolism (CKM), an AI workflow for hypothesis generation with three key capabilities: (i) continuous literature metabolism via sliding windows that maintain an evolving knowledge state; (ii) predictive evaluation, which grades hypotheses against papers published after the generation window; and (iii) practitioner-grade failure detection that diagnoses workflow failure modes from its outputs. On a 50-topic machine learning benchmark, CKM-Lite produces at least one validated hypothesis on 72% of topics (36 out of 50), more than doubling a one-shot baseline (30%) at approximately 3 dollars per topic and achieving 91% lower token cost. Validated hypotheses precede their matched papers by an average of 404 days (55 hits across 36 topics; median 399 days, range 66-757 days). Broadly, predictive validation against future literature provides a falsifiable, low-cost alternative to contemporary-judge evaluation protocols and can be applied wherever a corpus has dated publication records.