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[Submitted on 15 Oct 2026] Title:Null Controls Are Necessary but Not Sufficient: Evaluating Acceptance Guards for Scientific Discovery and Interpretability View a PDF of the paper titled Null Controls Are Necessary but Not Sufficient: Evaluating Acceptance Guards for Scientific Discovery and Interpretability, by Tianyu Wu (Project Aether) View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Automated discovery systems propose scientific explanations and test which to accept. Does passing a test establish the intended claim? We develop four executable operations for changing physical descriptions: identifying redundancies (L1), coarse-graining dynamics (L2), transferring structure (L3), and inferring missing quantities from conservation imbalances (L4). We evaluate these operations and three interpretability settings through null acceptance (NAR), positive acceptance (PAR), and consequence agreement (CAR). A reduction mapping every state to zero predicts its own future perfectly. It passes closure on 96% of 129 public chaotic systems despite retaining no dynamical variation. An independent observable-preservation test rejects it throughout. On controlled benchmarks, the combined criteria accept 24/24 genuine reductions and reject 72/72 nulls. The other operations distinguish symmetries from redundancies, validate transfers, and reject spurious conservation imbalances. In language and ESM-2 protein models, linear CKA remains unchanged when a proposed correspondence is randomly rotated, whereas localized interventions distinguish genuine mappings from tested nulls. In sparse autoencoders, enrichment rejects all 16 tested nulls, yet independent ablation supports 45% of evaluable enriched features, compared with 0.5% of matched controls. These results reveal two acceptance gaps: descriptive tests can accept scientifically empty candidates, and accepted candidates can lack independently verified consequences. Reliable automated discovery requires evaluating both what a test accepts and the scientific consequences it establishes. Code and data: this https URL. Comments: accpeted in 40th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2026). Workshop: XAI4Science: Knowledge Discovery and Trust through Interpretable Foundation Models Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Machine Learning (cs.LG) Cite as: arXiv:2610.22445 [cs.AI] (or arXiv:2610.22445v1 [cs.AI] for this version) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.22445 arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite Submission history From: Tianyu Wu [view email] [v1] Thu, 15 Oct 2026 15:13:57 UTC (472 KB) Full-text links: Access Paper: View a PDF of the paper titled Null Controls Are Necessary but Not Sufficient: Evaluating Acceptance Guards for Scientific Discovery and Interpretability, by Tianyu Wu (Project Aether) View PDF HTML (experimental) TeX Source view license Additional Features Audio Summary Current browse context: cs.AI new | recent | 2026-10 Change to browse by: cs cs.LG References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Loading... Data provided by: Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article alphaXiv Toggle alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?) Links to Code Toggle CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?) DagsHub Toggle DagsHub (What is DagsHub?) GotitPub Toggle Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?) Huggingface Toggle Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?) ScienceCast Toggle ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?) Demos Demos Replicate Toggle Replicate (What is Replicate?) Spaces Toggle Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?) Spaces Toggle TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?) Related Papers Recommenders and Search Tools Link to Influence Flower Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?) Core recommender toggle CORE Recommender (What is CORE?) Author Venue Institution Topic About arXivLabs arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website. Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them. Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs. Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)