Scientific idea generation has been extensively studied in creativity theory and computational creativity research, providing valuable frameworks for understanding and implementing creative processes. However, recent work using Large Language Models (LLMs) for research idea generation often overlooks these theoretical foundations. We present a framework that explicitly implements combinatorial creativity theory using LLMs, featuring a generalization-level retrieval system for cross-domain knowledge discovery and a structured combinatorial process for idea generation. The retrieval system maps concepts across different abstraction levels to enable meaningful connections between disparate domains, while the combinatorial process systematically analyzes and recombines components to generate novel solutions. Experiments on the OAG-Bench dataset demonstrate our framework's effectiveness, consistently outperforming baseline approaches in generating ideas that align with real research developments (improving similarity scores by 7\%-10\% across multiple metrics). Our results provide strong evidence that LLMs can effectively realize combinatorial creativity when guided by appropriate theoretical frameworks, contributing both to practical advancement of AI-assisted research and theoretical understanding of machine creativity.

Given the challenge atively generated using . Furthermore, this that diffusion models face in directly generating creativity, meta-creativity enables direct concept combinations without existing methods typically rely on synthesizing reference requiring additional training, much like generating "a prompts or images to achieve creative effects. This significantly reduces both time and computational instance, to combine "Lettuce" and "Mantis" creatively, complexity compared to state-of-the-art (SOTA) ConceptLab [43] merges tokens representing these concepts creative generation methods, such as ConceptLab [43] (4s into a new composite token, while BASS [22] uses predefined vs. 120s per image, 30 speedup) and BASS [22] (4s vs. sampling rules to search for creative outcomes from a 2400s per image, 600 speedup), while maintaining linguistic large pool of candidate images. Further each generation, which leads to high computational costs evaluations using GPT-4o [1] and user studies indicate superior and limited practicality for online applications. In contrast, performance of CreTok in terms of integration, originality, "a blue banana" can be generated directly without additional and aesthetics, underscoring its effectiveness in fostering training, due to its clear and concrete semantics, especially combinatorial creativity. Inspired by this, we may Our contributions are as follows: (1) We propose Cre-ask: Can we awaken the creativity of diffusion models by Tok, a method designed to enhance models' meta-ability enhancing their semantic understanding of "creative"? To by enabling a enhanced understanding of abstract and ambiguous achieve this, we propose CreTok, which redefines "creative" adjectives (e.g., "creative" or "beautiful") through as a new specialized token, , allowing it their redefinition as new tokens. This redefinition we redefine the abstract term "creative" within our proposed enhances the model's semantic understanding for CangJie dataset for the TP2O task, and introduce combinatorial creativity, as shown in Figure 1c. Specifically, text-to-image (T2I) models and creative generation methods CreTok builds on the definition of "creativity" from in terms of computational complexity, human preference the TP2O task [22] for combinatorial object generation, ratings, text-image alignment, and other key metrics. ") and human-like creativity, a critical yet underexplored aspect an adaptive prompt (e.g., "A photo of a mixture"). of AI research [28, 29].

In this paper we propose the application of techniques from the field of creativity research to machine learned models within the domain of games. This application allows for the creation of new, distinct models without additional training data. The techniques in question are combinatorial creativity techniques, defined as techniques that combine two sets of input to create novel output sets. We present a survey of prior work in this area and a case study applying some of these techniques to pre-trained machine learned models of game level design.