EvoGens: A Population-Based Heuristic Search Framework for Scientific Idea Generation

Abstract: Generating novel research ideas is fundamental to scientific progress. While LLMs show promise in assisting this process, existing approaches often exhibit semantic convergence, resulting in limited diversity and novelty. To address this, we introduce EvoGens, an evolution-inspired framework that recasts scientific idea generation as an evolutionary search over a population of ideas. EvoGens iteratively applies rank-based mutation with differentiated retrieval planning to incorporate external knowledge, and semantic-aware crossover to fuse complementary concepts for conceptual reorganization. A lightweight evaluation signal guides the selection process, encouraging sustained exploration while mitigating premature convergence. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EvoGens substantially enhances exploration capabilities compared to state-of-the-art baselines. Specifically, it improves the Novelty from 0.1 to 0.4 and the Diversity from 0.24 to 0.55, while maintaining comparable idea quality under the current automatic evaluation protocol. These findings suggest that evolutionary mechanisms can serve as a useful framework for exploration-oriented research ideation, especially for broadening the novelty and diversity of candidate ideas under a shared automatic evaluation setting.