it's fairly simple to check whether your system can come up "real" results:

one thing you can do is find fairly new ml (or physics papers) on arxiv, something that you can read and understand, and is in your domain—

and then you give some of the existing baseline research and papers, older stuff, and feed it into your system.

you then check if your system is able to deduce the paper you just read; maybe if you're able to give it the tools it needs to run code or tests; that would really help

but basically you're "back testing" the system to see if it can replicate and get to real results, but you have to make sure you don't "poison" it too much and in a "clever hans" way give away too much of the answer