Articulating Assumptions in AI-Generated Scientific Analyses through Task Decomposition

Abstract

Scientific results produced by LLM generated analysis code must be understandable and reproducible. However, uncertainty can arise at different stages of the process, both in the original natural language specification and in the generated implementation. As a result, even executable code may not provide a clear understanding of which quantities are being computed or which assumptions determine the final results. To address this challenge, we introduce quantity grounded semantic differencing, a multi-agent framework for analyzing and comparing scientific programs generated by LLMs. The framework assigns code generation, execution, tracing, and validation to separate agents, allowing it to reconstruct how key output quantities are produced and to identify differences between the intended analysis and the implemented code. We also introduce a module that inspects ambiguities in the initial user instruction and suggests alternative rewrites before code generation. Its modular design enables application to different scientific domains by replacing domain specific resources while preserving the same workflow. We validate the framework on representative collider physics analyses. The results demonstrate that the modular task decomposition enhances both transparency and reliability relative to the previous single prompt approach, while enabling substantially smaller models to execute the complete workflow.