Current LLMs struggle with scientific lineage reasoning (only 27.3% accuracy), suggesting AI systems need better mechanisms to understand how ideas inherit, mutate, and recombine across research communities.
This paper introduces IdeaGene-Bench, a benchmark for evaluating whether AI systems can understand how scientific ideas evolve and build on each other. It represents papers as 'Idea Genomes' with tracked inheritance patterns, and tests both reasoning about scientific lineages and generating new ideas that fit coherently into existing research traditions across 10 scientific domains.