Proof of Time (PoT) is a semi-verifiable benchmarking framework for evaluating scientific idea judgments. By time-partitioning evaluation data, we freeze evidence before a cutoff, ask models to forecast outcomes, and score them when the future arrives—enabling scalable, verifiable evaluation without manual labeling.
Paper: Proof of Time: A Benchmark for Evaluating Scientific Idea Judgments (Under Review)
You can download our generated questions from: https://huggingface.co/datasets/AIM-Harvard/proof-of-time/tree/main/benchmarks
Key Features:
- Time-Partitioned: Ground truth arrives naturally as time passes—no manual labeling needed
- Semi-Verifiable: Benchmarks link to real-world signals (citations, awards, leaderboards) that become observable post-cutoff
- Scalable: Over 30,000 instances spanning four task families
- Agentic: ReAct agents with sandboxed access to historical paper data
# 1. Clone and install
git clone https://github.com/shan23chen/proof_of_time.git
cd proof_of_time
uv sync
source .venv/bin/activate
# 2. download data files from huggingface and patch them
export HF_TOKEN="your_hf_token"
huggingface-cli download AIM-Harvard/proof-of-time \
--repo-type dataset \
--include "benchmarks/*" \
--local-dir ./temp_patch
rsync -av ./temp_patch/benchmarks/ ./benchmarks/
rm -rf temp_patch
# 3. Set up API keys
cp .env.example .env
# Edit .env with your API keys
# 4. Run a quick test (5 samples)
inspect eval benchmarks/award_react/benchmark.py@pre_cutoff_simple_task \
--model openai/gpt-5-mini-2025-08-07 \
--limit 5
# 5. Check results
inspect viewFor detailed setup instructions, see SETUP.md.
- Overview
- Task Families
- Installation
- Running Benchmarks
- Dataset
- Analysis
- Repository Structure
- Key Results
- Citation
- License
Judging the quality of scientific ideas is hard. Current methods rely on immediate proxies—but true impact takes time to reveal itself. Proof of Time (PoT) solves this by time-partitioning the evaluation: we freeze evidence before a cutoff, ask models to forecast outcomes, and score them when the future arrives.
The PoT workflow: Evidence is frozen at a cutoff. Models forecast future outcomes. Ground truth arrives—enabling scalable, verifiable evaluation.
The name reflects our focus on temporal reasoning: agents must analyze historical patterns to make predictions about future research directions, award recipients, and citation impact. Tasks require genuine understanding of research trends rather than memorization.
- ReAct Agents: Agents use tools (bash, Python, text editor) to explore sandboxed paper datasets
- Sandboxed Environments: Docker containers with read-only paper data (no internet access)
- Offline Prompt: Custom "Antigravity" prompt inspired by principles of focused exploration
- Multiple Variants: Each task has standard (agent), simple (zero-shot), and no-offline-prompt versions
The suite includes 4 task families(you can sample and generated a new test set anytime):
| Task Family | Description | Agent Access |
|---|---|---|
| Impact Prediction | Forecasting paper influence (citations) from limited cues | Historical papers with citation counts |
| Scientific Value | Predicting peer-review awards (Best Papers) | Conference accepted papers |
| Research Evolution | Longitudinal reasoning about faculty trajectories | Per-professor publication histories |
| Technological Frontier | Extrapolating benchmark progress (SOTA) | Frontier model benchmark scores |
1. Impact Prediction (benchmarks/citation_react/)
Predict future citation counts for recently published papers. Can models identify which papers will have higher impact?
Tasks: Multiple choice, Ranking, Bucket prediction (0-1, 1-5, 5-10, 10-50, 50+ citations)
2. Scientific Value (benchmarks/award_react/)
Predict which papers will win best paper awards. Can models align with expert judgments?
Tasks: Pre-cutoff awards (2018-2024), Post-cutoff EMNLP/ACL/NAACL 2025 awards
3. Research Evolution (benchmarks/future_work_react/)
Predict research directions of AI faculty members based on publication history.
Tasks: Professor field prediction, Article attribution, Field focus classification
4. Technological Frontier (benchmarks/sota_forecast/)
Extrapolate benchmark progress and forecast future SOTA metrics.
Tasks: Bucket prediction for benchmark scores (0-20, 20-40, 40-60, 60-80, 80-100)
- Python 3.10 or higher
- Docker (for sandbox environments)
- uv package manager
- API keys for LLM providers
# Clone repository
git clone https://github.com/shan23chen/proof_of_time.git
cd proof_of_time
# Install dependencies
uv sync
source .venv/bin/activate
# download data files from huggingface and patch them
export HF_TOKEN="your_hf_token"
huggingface-cli download AIM-Harvard/proof-of-time \
--repo-type dataset \
--include "benchmarks/*" \
--local-dir ./temp_patch
rsync -av ./temp_patch/benchmarks/ ./benchmarks/
rm -rf temp_patch
# Configure API keys
cp .env.example .env
# Edit .env with your OpenAI/Anthropic/Google API keys
export $(cat .env | xargs)
# Verify Docker is running
docker psFor detailed installation instructions, troubleshooting, and Docker setup, see SETUP.md.
# Run award prediction with GPT-5-mini (5 samples)
inspect eval benchmarks/award_react/benchmark.py@pre_cutoff_task \
--model openai/gpt-5-mini-2025-08-07 \
--limit 5# Run all award prediction variants
inspect eval benchmarks/award_react/benchmark.py \
--model openai/gpt-5-mini-2025-08-07
# Run all citation forecasting variants
inspect eval benchmarks/citation_react/benchmark.py \
--model openai/gpt-5-mini-2025-08-07Run all benchmarks across multiple models with ablations:
# Run all models and tasks (with/without offline prompt)
uv run scripts/run_inspect_ablations.py
# Run specific models only
uv run scripts/run_inspect_ablations.py \
--models openai/gpt-5-mini-2025-08-07 google/gemini-3-flash-preview
# Run with different message limits
bash run_message_limit_sweep.shSupported Models:
- OpenAI:
gpt-5.2,gpt-5.1,gpt-5-mini,gpt-5-nano - Google:
gemini-3-pro,gemini-3-flash,vertex/gemini-2.5-pro/flash - Anthropic:
vertex/claude-opus-4-5,vertex/claude-sonnet-4-5,vertex/claude-haiku-4-5
Logs are saved to logs/ablations/<model-slug>/<task>.log.
Benchmark datasets and sandbox data are available on HuggingFace:
Repository: AIM-Harvard/proof-of-time
# Download with datasets library
pip install datasets
python -c "from datasets import load_dataset; ds = load_dataset('AIM-Harvard/proof-of-time')"
# Or clone manually
git clone https://huggingface.co/datasets/AIM-Harvard/proof-of-timebenchmarks/
├── award_react/ Award prediction tasks
├── citation_react/ Citation forecasting tasks
├── future_work_react/ Faculty prediction tasks
└── sota_forecast/ SOTA benchmark tasks
sandbox_data/
├── citation/ Historical papers with citations
├── award/ Conference accepted papers with tiers
├── faculty/ Conference accepted papers
└── sota/ Conference accepted papers
To create custom datasets or update with new data:
# Regenerate award prediction tasks
uv run python dataset_building/generate_award_datasets.py
# Regenerate citation forecasting tasks
uv run python dataset_building/generate_citation_datasets.py
# Regenerate faculty prediction tasks
uv run python dataset_building/generate_faculty_futurework.py
# Regenerate SOTA forecasting tasks
uv run python dataset_building/generate_sota_forecast.pySee dataset_building/README.md for detailed instructions.
Generate plots, tables, and reports from evaluation logs:
# Run full analysis pipeline
cd analysis/comprehensive
python main.py
# Generate plots only
python main.py --plots-only
# Generate report only
python main.py --report-onlyOutputs:
plots/- Performance visualizations by model, task, ablationtables/- CSV summaries of resultsREPORT.md- Comprehensive markdown report
Explore EMNLP paper topics and trends:
# Install dashboard dependencies
uv sync --extra dashboard
# Launch dashboard
python analysis/emnlp_topics_dashboard.py
# Export CSV summaries without UI
python analysis/emnlp_topics_dashboard.py --exportAccess at http://127.0.0.1:8050 (use --host and --port to customize).
See analysis/README.md for more details.
proof_of_time/
├── benchmarks/ # Inspect AI benchmark implementations
│ ├── award_react/ # Award prediction tasks
│ ├── citation_react/ # Citation forecasting tasks
│ ├── future_work_react/ # Faculty prediction tasks
│ ├── sota_forecast/ # SOTA forecasting tasks
│ └── common/ # Shared utilities and prompts
├── dataset_building/ # Scripts to generate benchmark datasets
├── analysis/ # Result analysis and visualization
│ ├── comprehensive/ # Main analysis pipeline
│ ├── agent_behavior/ # Agent action analysis
│ └── query_analysis/ # Query pattern analysis
├── scripts/ # Convenience scripts for running experiments
│ ├── run_inspect_ablations.py # Systematic ablation runner
│ ├── upload_to_huggingface.py # Dataset upload script
│ └── parse_ablation_logs.py # Log parsing utilities
├── run_message_limit_sweep.sh # Message limit experiments
├── .env.example # API key configuration template
├── pyproject.toml # Python dependencies
├── SETUP.md # Detailed setup instructions
├── CITATION.md # Citation information
└── LICENSE # MIT License
Agentic systems generally outperform zero-shot baselines on tasks requiring evidence exploration.
If you use this benchmark suite in your research, please cite our work:
@misc{ye2026prooftimebenchmarkevaluating,
title={Proof of Time: A Benchmark for Evaluating Scientific Idea Judgments},
author={Bingyang Ye and Shan Chen and Jingxuan Tu and Chen Liu and Zidi Xiong and Samuel Schmidgall and Danielle S. Bitterman},
year={2026},
eprint={2601.07606},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
primaryClass={cs.CL},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.07606},
}See CITATION.md for more details.
This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.
We welcome contributions! To add new benchmarks or improve existing ones:
- Fork the repository
- Create a feature branch
- Add your benchmark following the patterns in
benchmarks/ - Add documentation (README.md for your benchmark)
- Test with
inspect evaland--limit 5 - Submit a pull request
- Built with Inspect AI framework
- Uses data from ACL Anthology, Google Scholar, and Papers with Code
- Thanks to the AI research community for making papers publicly available
- Issues: https://github.com/shan23chen/proof_of_time/issues
- Project: AIM Harvard