arXiv AI

SCICONVBENCH: Benchmarking LLMs on Multi-Turn Clarification for Task Formulation in Computational Science

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.

arXiv AI
6d ago

Re4: Scientific Computing Agent with Rewriting, Resolution, Review and Revision

The paper introduces Re4, a scientific computing agent that employs a four-step logical chain—rewriting, resolution, review, and revision—using three large language models: a Consultant, a Programmer, and a Reviewer. The Consultant rewrites problem descriptions by linking them to domain knowledge, the Programmer generates and runs code, and the Reviewer iteratively refines the code through self-debugging. Experiments on PDEs, fluid dynamics, ill‑conditioned linear systems, and data‑driven physics show that this collaborative framework markedly improves bug‑free code generation and execution success rates across several LLMs.

By Ao Cheng, Lei Zhang, Guowei He
arXiv AI
3d ago

Assessing Language Models for Scientific Applications: Inertial Confinement Fusion as a Use Case

The paper introduces a benchmark of 250 expert-curated questions on inertial confinement fusion to evaluate language models on scientific fluency, physical reasoning, and quantitative analysis. It compares various closed‑source, open‑source, and a specialized model called Prospero, showing that Prospero improves by 10.7 percentage points and that frontier models still make critical physics errors. Retrieval assistance helps smaller models but not frontier ones, and two stress tests highlight the need for expert assessment of physical assumptions.

By P. B. Radha, D. D. Meyerhofer, M. Bhattarai, B. Cheng, L. Diaz, C. L. Rousculp, A. G. Seaton, G. Gupta, P. Gurumurthy, V. Gutta, A. Jhunjhunwala, A. Vem, P. Cook, G. Rowe
arXiv AI
3d ago

PAPERBENCHX: Can AI Reproduce Science Across Disciplines?

PAPERBENCHX is a new benchmark that tests whether AI can reproduce scientific experiments across 12 disciplines, including electromagnetics, photonics, chemistry, materials science, biology, and robotics. It consists of 93 expert-constructed tasks, each providing a source paper, a public specification, and a domain-native scientific environment. The benchmark evaluates AI agents by having them reconstruct, execute, and diagnose key experiments, then replay submissions from scratch to score regenerated evidence against expert-validated criteria, revealing that current AI configurations fully reproduce only 14% of tasks.

By Ruoyu Wu, Zengji Tu, Aolong Sun, Tianyi Ma, Junren Li, Xinbo Xu, Li Fu, Ziyan Zhang, Pinrui Huang, Xiaochen Wang, Chengda Wu, Yutao Zhou, Jianjun Wu, Lin Chang, Baobao Chang, Liang Chen, Kuan Li
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

SciOrch: Learning to Orchestrate Expert LLMs for Solving Frontier Multimodal Scientific Reasoning Tasks

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 Machine Learning
Aug 27

SciMIF: Understanding Multimodal Instruction Following in Scientific Domains

SciMIF is a new benchmark that evaluates how well multimodal large language models (MLLMs) can follow complex scientific instructions. It is built on an analysis of 22 tasks across five scientific fields and introduces a taxonomy of 10 constraint groups that capture both general and discipline‑specific requirements. Experiments show large performance gaps between fields—chemistry is hardest—and that larger models do not necessarily improve constraint adherence, especially for fine‑grained, knowledge‑heavy instructions.

By Ye Shen, Yuting Zheng, Dun Pei, Zijian Chen, Wenlong Zhang, Qi Jia, Guangtao Zhai
arXiv AI
Oct 2

Ontology-Grounded, Reasoner-Verified Benchmarks for Evaluating LLM Reasoning in Scientific AI

The paper introduces a pipeline that automatically creates ontology‑grounded multiple‑choice question benchmarks for evaluating large language models (LLMs) on logical reasoning tasks in scientific AI. By using OWL 2 ontologies, correct answers are guaranteed by design and distractors are generated and formally verified as incorrect through an OWL reasoner. Experiments on three ontologies—Pizza, PMDco, and DOID—yielded 112, 2,491, and 15,216 MCQs, respectively, with high natural‑language quality and challenging zero‑shot performance for six LLMs.

By Nishtha N. Vaidya, Stephan Grimm, Thomas Hubauer, Thomas A. Runkler