ACADREASON: Exploring the Limits of Reasoning Models with Academic Research Problems

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11652v1
• Date: Mon, 13 Oct 2025 17:30:36 GMT
• Title: ACADREASON: Exploring the Limits of Reasoning Models with Academic Research Problems
• Authors: Xin Gui, King Zhu, JinCheng Ren, Qianben Chen, Zekun Moore Wang, Yizhi LI, Xinpeng Liu, Xiaowan Li, Wenli Ren, Linyu Miao, Tianrui Qin, Ziqi Shu, He Zhu, Xiangru Tang, Dingfeng Shi, Jiaheng Liu, Yuchen Eleanor Jiang, Minghao Liu, Ge Zhang, Wangchunshu Zhou,
• Abstract summary: Acadreason benchmark is designed to evaluate the ability of LLMs and agents to acquire and reason over academic knowledge.<n>It consists of 50 expert-annotated academic problems across five high-reasoning domains, including computer science, economics, law, mathematics, and philosophy.<n>Results show that most LLMs scored below 20 points, with even the cutting-edge GPT-5 achieving only 16 points.
• Score: 47.451132653010774
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: In recent years, the research focus of large language models (LLMs) and agents has shifted increasingly from demonstrating novel capabilities to complex reasoning and tackling challenging tasks. However, existing evaluations focus mainly on math/code contests or general tasks, while existing multi-domain academic benchmarks lack sufficient reasoning depth, leaving the field without a rigorous benchmark for high-level reasoning. To fill this gap, we introduce the Acadreason benchmark, designed to evaluate the ability of LLMs and agents to acquire and reason over academic knowledge. It consists of 50 expert-annotated academic problems across five high-reasoning domains, including computer science, economics, law, mathematics, and philosophy. All questions are sourced from top-tier publications in recent years and undergo rigorous annotation and quality control to ensure they are both challenging and answerable. We conduct systematic evaluations of over 10 mainstream LLMs and agents. The results show that most LLMs scored below 20 points, with even the cutting-edge GPT-5 achieving only 16 points. While agents achieved higher scores, none exceeded 40 points. This demonstrates the current capability gap between LLMs and agents in super-intelligent academic research tasks and highlights the challenges of Acadreason.

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