AI Can Learn Scientific Taste

arXiv:2603.14473v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Scientific discovery depends on expert judgement and foresight, which we call scientific taste: the ability to judge and propose research ideas with potential for long-term scientific impact. Whether AI can learn this ability remains an open question. Here we provide evidence that artificial intelligence can learn judgement and ideation. We introduce Reinforcement Learning from Community Feedback (RLCF), a training paradigm that uses large-scale signals from scientific community as supervision. We first train Scientific Judge on field- and time-matched pairs of high- vs. low-citation papers to judge ideas. We then train a Scientific Thinker, to propose research ideas with high potential impact. Experiments show that the 30B Scientific Judge variant outperforms strong LLM baselines (e.g., GPT-5.4 Thinking), while Scientific Judge generalizes across future-year papers, unseen fields, and other community metrics. Furthermore, Scientific Thinker proposes research ideas with higher potential impact than baselines. These results suggest that AI can learn scientific taste, marking an important step towards AI systems that could help accelerate scientific discovery.