ScholarBench: A Bilingual Benchmark for Abstraction, Comprehension, and Reasoning Evaluation in Academic Contexts

Abstract: Prior benchmarks for evaluating the domain-specific knowledge of LLMs lack the scalability to handle complex academic tasks. To address this, we introduce \texttt{ScholarBench}, a benchmark centered on deep expert knowledge and complex academic problem-solving, which evaluates the academic reasoning ability of LLMs and is constructed through a three-step process. \texttt{ScholarBench} targets more specialized and logically complex contexts derived from academic literature, encompassing five distinct problem types. Unlike prior benchmarks, \texttt{ScholarBench} evaluates the abstraction, comprehension, and reasoning capabilities of LLMs across eight distinct research domains. To ensure high-quality evaluation data, we define category-specific example attributes and design questions that are aligned with the characteristic research methodologies and discourse structures of each domain. Additionally, this benchmark operates as an English-Korean bilingual dataset, facilitating simultaneous evaluation for linguistic capabilities of LLMs in both languages. The benchmark comprises 5,031 examples in Korean and 5,309 in English, with even state-of-the-art models like o3-mini achieving an average evaluation score of only 0.543, demonstrating the challenging nature of this benchmark.