Evaluation-driven Scaling for Scientific Discovery

Language models are increasingly used in scientific discovery to generate hypotheses, propose candidate solutions, implement systems, and iteratively refine them. At the core of these trial-and-error loops lies evaluation: the process of obtaining feedback on candidate solutions via verifiers, simulators, or task-specific scoring functions. While prior work has highlighted the importance of evaluation, it has not explicitly formulated the problem of how evaluation-driven discovery loops can be scaled up in a principled and effective manner to push the boundaries of scientific discovery, a problem this paper seeks to address. We introduce Simple Test-time Evaluation-driven Scaling (SimpleTES), a general framework that strategically combines parallel exploration, feedback-driven refinement, and local selection, revealing substantial gains unlocked by scaling evaluation-driven discovery loops along the right dimensions. Across 21 scientific problems spanning six domains, SimpleTES discovers state-of-the-art solutions using gpt-oss models, consistently outperforming both frontier-model baselines and sophisticated optimization pipelines. Particularly, we sped up the widely used LASSO algorithm by over 2x, designed quantum circuit routing policies that reduce gate overhead by 24.5%, and discovered new Erdos minimum overlap constructions that surpass the best-known results. Beyond novel discoveries, SimpleTES produces trajectory-level histories that naturally supervise feedback-driven learning. When post-trained on successful trajectories, models not only improve efficiency on seen problems but also generalize to unseen problems, discovering solutions that base models fail to uncover. Together, our results establish effective evaluation-driven loop scaling as a central axis for advancing LLM-driven scientific discovery, and provide a simple yet practical framework for realizing these gains.

RefracGS: Novel View Synthesis Through Refractive Water Surfaces with 3D Gaussian Ray Tracing

Novel view synthesis (NVS) through non-planar refractive surfaces presents fundamental challenges due to severe, spatially varying optical distortions. While recent representations like NeRF and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) excel at NVS, their assumption of straight-line ray propagation fails under these conditions, leading to significant artifacts. To overcome this limitation, we introduce RefracGS, a framework that jointly reconstructs the refractive water surface and the scene beneath the interface. Our key insight is to explicitly decouple the refractive boundary from the target objects: the refractive surface is modeled via a neural height field, capturing wave geometry, while the underlying scene is represented as a 3D Gaussian field. We formulate a refraction-aware Gaussian ray tracing approach that accurately computes non-linear ray trajectories using Snell's law and efficiently renders the underlying Gaussian field while backpropagating the loss gradients to the parameterized refractive surface. Through end-to-end joint optimization of both representations, our method ensures high-fidelity NVS and view-consistent surface recovery. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world scenes with complex waves demonstrate that RefracGS outperforms prior refractive methods in visual quality, while achieving 15x faster training and real-time rendering at 200 FPS. The project page for RefracGS is available at https://yimgshao.github.io/refracgs/.

GeoSplatting: Towards Geometry Guided Gaussian Splatting for Physically-based Inverse Rendering

We consider the problem of physically-based inverse rendering using 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) representations. While recent 3DGS methods have achieved remarkable results in novel view synthesis (NVS), accurately capturing high-fidelity geometry, physically interpretable materials and lighting remains challenging, as it requires precise geometry modeling to provide accurate surface normals, along with physically-based rendering (PBR) techniques to ensure correct material and lighting disentanglement. Previous 3DGS methods resort to approximating surface normals, but often struggle with noisy local geometry, leading to inaccurate normal estimation and suboptimal material-lighting decomposition. In this paper, we introduce GeoSplatting, a novel hybrid representation that augments 3DGS with explicit geometric guidance and differentiable PBR equations. Specifically, we bridge isosurface and 3DGS together, where we first extract isosurface mesh from a scalar field, then convert it into 3DGS points and formulate PBR equations for them in a fully differentiable manner. In GeoSplatting, 3DGS is grounded on the mesh geometry, enabling precise surface normal modeling, which facilitates the use of PBR frameworks for material decomposition. This approach further maintains the efficiency and quality of NVS from 3DGS while ensuring accurate geometry from the isosurface. Comprehensive evaluations across diverse datasets demonstrate the superiority of GeoSplatting, consistently outperforming existing methods both quantitatively and qualitatively.