# MindFlow: Mind Supernet Powered Thinking Flows for Research Idea Innovation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11966 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.11966/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Oct 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03300/) (2024)
- [DAPO: An Open-Source LLM Reinforcement Learning System at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14476/) (2025)
- [The AI Scientist: Towards Fully Automated Open-Ended Scientific Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06292/) (2024)
- [AFlow: Automating Agentic Workflow Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10762/) (2024)
- [The AI Scientist-v2: Workshop-Level Automated Scientific Discovery via Agentic Tree Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08066/) (2025)
- [Accelerating scientific discovery with Co-Scientist](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.18864/) (2025)
- [Can LLMs Generate Novel Research Ideas? A Large-Scale Human Study with 100+ NLP Researchers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.04109/) (2024)
- [ResearchAgent: Iterative Research Idea Generation over Scientific Literature with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07738/) (2024)
- [SciMON: Scientific Inspiration Machines Optimized for Novelty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14259/) (2023)
- [Multi-agent Architecture Search via Agentic Supernet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.04180/) (2025)
- [SciCode: A Research Coding Benchmark Curated by Scientists](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13168/) (2024)
- [Artificial Hivemind: The Open-Ended Homogeneity of Language Models (and Beyond)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.22954/) (2025)
- [Large Language Models for Automated Open-domain Scientific Hypotheses Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.02726/) (2023)
- [Chain of Ideas: Revolutionizing Research Via Novel Idea Development with LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13185/) (2024)
- [Kosmos: An AI Scientist for Autonomous Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.02824/) (2025)
- [Hypothesis Generation with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04326/) (2024)
- [LitSearch: A Retrieval Benchmark for Scientific Literature Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.18940/) (2024)
- [CiteME: Can Language Models Accurately Cite Scientific Claims?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12861/) (2024)
- [AI Idea Bench 2025: AI Research Idea Generation Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14191/) (2025)
- [Probing Scientific General Intelligence of LLMs with Scientist-Aligned Workflows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.16969/) (2025)
- [SciPIP: An LLM-based Scientific Paper Idea Proposer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23166/) (2024)
- [Scientific Language Models for Biomedical Knowledge Base Completion: An Empirical Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09700/) (2021)
- [ArenaRL: Scaling RL for Open-Ended Agents via Tournament-based Relative Ranking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.06487/) (2026)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [JANUS: Enhancing Long-Horizon Autonomous Research with Co-Evolving World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.13194/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Research idea innovation is a fundamental engine of scientific progress, yet it remains difficult to generate and evaluate in a scalable and controllable way. This challenge lies in its inherently open-ended and multi-objective nature, where ideas should balance novelty, plausibility and feasibility. While recent LLM-based approaches have made progress through carefully designed prompts or agent pipelines, they are constrained by predefined, static ideation workflows. To address this limitation, we propose MindFlow, a framework that explicitly formulates ideation as a graph-structured Flow in Mind, which is composed of modular thinking operators and modeled by a probabilistic mind supernet. Given a research topic, a controller dynamically samples thinking flows to generate candidate ideas. This open-ended problem is optimized using a tournament-based relative ranking, enabling the controller to progressively favor higher-quality thinking flows. We further introduce an evaluation protocol that jointly assesses problem finding and problem solving, going beyond title- or abstractonly judgments. Across diverse topics, MindFlow shows its superiority as an explicit, controllable and optimizable research idea innovator.