In-Context Examples Suppress Scientific Knowledge Recall in LLMs

ArXi:2604.27540v1 Announce Type: new Scientific reasoning rarely stops at what is directly observable; it often requires uncovering hidden structure from data. From estimating reaction constants in chemistry to inferring demand elasticities in economics, this latent structure recovery is what distinguishes scientific reasoning from curve fitting. Large language models (LLMs) can often recall and apply relevant scientific formulas, but we show that this ability is surprisingly easy to suppress.