The paper investigates whether domain-specific fine‑tuning benefits open‑ended scientific reasoning in astronomy. Using a curated 300‑question QA benchmark from 2017–2026 Olympiad‑style materials, the authors compare open‑weight, API‑served general‑purpose, multimodal, and astronomy‑specialized language models. Results show that strong general‑purpose models set the highest correctness baseline, but variations in metric agreement, judge sensitivity, benchmark composition, and modality suggest that domain specialization is task‑ and deployment‑dependent and that domain‑specific evaluation is crucial for scientific workflows.
By Vanessa Lama, Sanjay Das, Emily Herron, Yuan-Sen Ting, Tijmen de Haan, Junqi Yin, Tirthankar Ghosal, Feiyi Wang
NL2AGBench is a benchmark that evaluates how well large language models can translate English geometry problems into the formal language required by AlphaGeometry’s theorem‑proving engine. The study tests ten state‑of‑the‑art LLMs, comparing executable translation accuracy, syntactic correctness, and error types, and finds a large gap between closed‑source and open‑source models. The authors also propose an error taxonomy and test mitigation strategies such as few‑shot prompting, fine‑tuning, and human‑guided hinting, which improve performance across model families.
By Samuel Xiao, Judy Song, Rory Hu, Ziliang Zong
The paper presents a SciBERT-based method for automatically classifying scientific papers into four telescope-related categories—science, instrumentation, mention, and not telescope—within strict 512-token limits. Despite truncation challenges, the approach achieved a macro F1 score of 0.89, topping the WASP-2025 leaderboard. The authors analyze truncation effects, compare chunking and long-context models, and offer insights into efficient scientific text curation.
By Madhusudhana Naidu
Scientific datasets are commonly organized as hierarchical repositories containing heterogeneous and interdependent files, making their inspection, integration, and analysis labor-intensive and reliant on domain expertise. Although large language model (LLM) agents have advanced substantially in planning, reasoning, and tool use, existing research has largely overlooked their ability to interact with real scientific data assets through executable environments.
arXiv:2602. 16902v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce LLM-Wikirace, a benchmark for evaluating planning, reasoning, and world knowledge in large language models (LLMs).
By Juliusz Ziomek, William Bankes, Lorenz Wolf, Shyam Sundhar Ramesh, Xiaohang Tang, Ilija Bogunovic
arXiv:2509. 21028v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce SciTrek, a synthetic question-answering dataset for assessing and improving long-context numerical reasoning in large language models (LLMs).
By Miao Li, Alexander Gurung, Irina Saparina, Mirella Lapata
SCICONVBENCH is a benchmark designed to evaluate large language models (LLMs) on multi‑turn clarification tasks in computational science. It focuses on two key abilities: eliciting missing information (disambiguation) and resolving contradictory requests (inconsistency resolution) across four domains—fluid mechanics, solid mechanics, materials science, and partial differential equations. The benchmark pairs a structured task ontology with a rubric‑based evaluation framework, measuring LLM performance in clarification behavior, conversational grounding, and final‑specification fidelity, and reveals that even top models only resolve about 52.7% of disambiguation cases in fluid mechanics while often making ungrounded assumptions.
By Nithin Somasekharan, Youssef Hassan, Shiyao Lin, Gihan Panapitiya, Patrick Emami, Anurag Acharya, Sameera Horawalavithana, Shaowu Pan
arXiv:2607. 20926v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Scientific research involves complex information-seeking and reasoning workflows across heterogeneous sources.
By Yinhao Tang, Youqing Fang, Yanan Sun, Wenran Liu, Weiming Zhang, Bin Liu, Kuikun Liu, Wenwei Zhang, Kai Chen
arXiv:2606.15872v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Frontier scientific reasoning remains a major challenge for large language models (LLMs), where even the strongest commercial systems fall short of...
By Jingru Guo, Xiangyuan Xue, Lian Zhang, Wanghan Xu, Siki Chen, Philip Torr, Wanli Ouyang, Lei Bai, Zhenfei Yin
arXiv:2606. 14142v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly adopted as backbones for Generative Recommendation (GR), promising access to pretrained world knowledge.
By Yinhan He, Liam Collins, Bhuvesh Kumar, Jundong Li, Neil Shah, Donald Loveland
arXiv:2505.23126v5 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Although many benchmarks evaluate the reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) within domains such as mathematics, coding, or data wrang...
By Atharva Naik, Prakam, Yash Mathur, Darsh Agrawal, Manav Kapadnis, Yuwei An, Clayton Marr, Carolyn Rose, David Mortensen
arXiv:2606. 27047v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance across a wide range of tasks, but ensuring their reliability in highly technical domains remains a significant challenge.
By Henry Shaowu Yuchi, Michal Kucer, Benjamin H. Sims, Selma Peterson, Emily Taylor