IdeaSynth: Iterative Research Idea Development Through Evolving and Composing Idea Facets with Literature-Grounded Feedback

Research ideation involves broad exploring and deep refining ideas. Both require deep engagement with literature. Existing tools focus primarily on idea broad generation, yet offer little support for iterative specification, refinement, and evaluation needed to further develop initial ideas. To bridge this gap, we introduce IdeaSynth, a research idea development system that uses LLMs to provide literature-grounded feedback for articulating research problems, solutions, evaluations, and contributions. IdeaSynth represents these idea facets as nodes on a canvas, and allow researchers to iteratively refine them by creating and exploring variations and composing them. Our lab study (N=20) showed that participants, while using IdeaSynth, explored more alternative ideas and expanded initial ideas with more details compared to a strong LLM-based baseline. Our deployment study (N=7) demonstrated that participants effectively used IdeaSynth for real-world research projects at various ideation stages from developing initial ideas to revising framings of mature manuscripts, highlighting the possibilities to adopt IdeaSynth in researcher's workflows.

I Am Not a Lawyer, But: Engaging Legal Experts towards Responsible LLM Policies for Legal Advice

The rapid proliferation of large language models (LLMs) as general purpose chatbots available to the public raises hopes around expanding access to professional guidance in law, medicine, and finance, while triggering concerns about public reliance on LLMs for high-stakes circumstances. Prior research has speculated on high-level ethical considerations but lacks concrete criteria determining when and why LLM chatbots should or should not provide professional assistance. Through examining the legal domain, we contribute a structured expert analysis to uncover nuanced policy considerations around using LLMs for professional advice, using methods inspired by case-based reasoning. We convened workshops with 20 legal experts and elicited dimensions on appropriate AI assistance for sample user queries (``cases''). We categorized our expert dimensions into: (1) user attributes, (2) query characteristics, (3) AI capabilities, and (4) impacts. Beyond known issues like hallucinations, experts revealed novel legal problems, including that users' conversations with LLMs are not protected by attorney-client confidentiality or bound to professional ethics that guard against conflicted counsel or poor quality advice. This accountability deficit led participants to advocate for AI systems to help users polish their legal questions and relevant facts, rather than recommend specific actions. More generally, we highlight the potential of case-based expert deliberation as a method of responsibly translating professional integrity and domain knowledge into design requirements to inform appropriate AI behavior when generating advice in professional domains.

Case Repositories: Towards Case-Based Reasoning for AI Alignment

Case studies commonly form the pedagogical backbone in law, ethics, and many other domains that face complex and ambiguous societal questions informed by human values. Similar complexities and ambiguities arise when we consider how AI should be aligned in practice: when faced with vast quantities of diverse (and sometimes conflicting) values from different individuals and communities, with whose values is AI to align, and how should AI do so? We propose a complementary approach to constitutional AI alignment, grounded in ideas from case-based reasoning (CBR), that focuses on the construction of policies through judgments on a set of cases. We present a process to assemble such a case repository by: 1) gathering a set of ``seed'' cases -- questions one may ask an AI system -- in a particular domain, 2) eliciting domain-specific key dimensions for cases through workshops with domain experts, 3) using LLMs to generate variations of cases not seen in the wild, and 4) engaging with the public to judge and improve cases. We then discuss how such a case repository could assist in AI alignment, both through directly acting as precedents to ground acceptable behaviors, and as a medium for individuals and communities to engage in moral reasoning around AI.