arXiv:2610.40700v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: To rigorously establish the value of a novel deep learning method, it must be compared against appropriate baselines. As deep learning has become increasingly common in the physical and life sciences, there have been numerous cases in which apparent progress has turned out to be an artifact of omitted or missing baselines. In this work, we investigate whether this problem can be mitigated by using large language models to automate the construction of baselines. We assemble 36 supervised classification and regression tasks from peer-reviewed studies in Nature, Science, and Cell-family journals that investigate novel deep learning methods for scientific applications. We then use a language model to construct simple baselines for each task. These automatically constructed baselines are strong, recovering a median of 95.5% (mean 85.7%) of the gap between a trivial predictor and the score of the deep learning model. The median simple baseline ...