Predicting Empirical AI Research Outcomes with Language Models

Many promising-looking ideas in AI research fail to deliver, but their validation takes substantial human labor and compute. Predicting an idea's chance of success is thus crucial for accelerating empirical AI research, a skill that even expert researchers can only acquire through substantial experience. We build the first benchmark for this task and compare LMs with human experts. Concretely, given two research ideas (e.g., two jailbreaking methods), we aim to predict which will perform better on a set of benchmarks. We scrape ideas and experimental results from conference papers, yielding 1,585 human-verified idea pairs \textit{published after our base model's cut-off date} for testing, and 6,000 pairs for training. We then develop a system that combines a fine-tuned GPT-4.1 with a paper retrieval agent, and we recruit 25 human experts to compare with. In the NLP domain, our system beats human experts by a large margin (64.4\% v.s. 48.9\%). On the full test set, our system achieves 77\% accuracy, while off-the-shelf frontier LMs like o3 perform no better than random guessing, even with the same retrieval augmentation. We verify that our system does not exploit superficial features like idea complexity through extensive human-written and LM-designed robustness tests. Finally, we evaluate our system on unpublished novel ideas, including ideas generated by an AI ideation agent. Our system achieves 63.6\% accuracy, demonstrating its potential as a reward model for improving idea generation models. Altogether, our results outline a promising new direction for LMs to accelerate empirical AI research.