cs.AISep 24, 2026

BioEVAL: A global, multi-institutional benchmark of large language and multimodal models for bioengineering

Authors: Shun Ye, Vinny Chandran Suja, Chenlong Li, Chongming Jiang, Reza Zamani, Xiang Li, Christopher Bain, Yuqi Zhou, 

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated historic breakthroughs in general reasoning with early successes in biomedical science. However, existing LLM benchmarking emphasizes factual recall, offering limited insight into model performance on frontier and multimodal tasks. We assembled BioEVAL (BioEngineering Validation of AI and LLMs), a global, multi-institutional initiative designed to assess experimental reasoning capability across bioengineering (BE) subfields. BioEVAL spans 11 major BE subfields plus a set of uncategorized items, bringing together 22 research groups to create a PhD-level benchmark comprising 608 evaluation items: 1) 380 multiple-choice questions (MCQs, 359 retained after audit), 2) 218 literature synthesis tasks, and 3) 10 multimodal problems with experimental image interpretation. Benchmark items underwent authoring-group expert review and centralized quality control before evaluation. Following evaluation, a blinded cross-group consensus audit of the highest- and lowest-accuracy MCQ items flagged 21 questions for revision or removal; these were withheld, and all reported MCQ results are computed on the 359 retained items. We evaluated diverse cloud-scale foundation/multimodal models (e.g., ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok) and locally deployable models suitable for inference on consumer-grade GPUs. Models achieved the highest accuracy of up to 90% on MCQs, similarity score of 0.72 on literature synthesis, and accuracy of 80% on a small sample of multimodal reasoning questions, with substantial performance variation across subfields. Leaderboard rankings characterize current capabilities, limitations, and development priorities across the evaluated BE task categories. BioEVAL is maintained as an extensible benchmark with standardized protocols for continuing expert item contribution and model evaluation.

Explore similar work

Apr 3, 2026

The limits of bio-molecular modeling with large language models : a cross-scale evaluation

The modeling of bio-molecular system across molecular scales remains a central challenge in scientific research. Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to bio-molecular discovery, yet systematic evaluation across multi-scale biological problems and rigorous assessment of their tool-augmented capabilities remain limited. We reveal a systematic gap between LLM performance and mechanistic understanding through the proposed cross-scale bio-molecular benchmark: BioMol-LLM-Bench, a unified framework comprising 26 downstream tasks that covers 4 distinct difficulty levels, and computational tools are integrated for a more comprehensive evaluation. Evaluation on 13 representative models reveals 4 main findings: chain-of-thought data provides limited benefit and may even reduce performance on biological tasks; hybrid mamba-attention architectures are more effective for long bio-molecular sequences; supervised fine-tuning improves specialization at the cost of generalization; and current LLMs perform well on classification tasks but remain weak on challenging regression tasks. Together, these findings provide practical guidance for future LLM-based modeling of molecular systems.
Jun 10, 2026

Reassessing High-Performing LLMs on Polish Medical Exams: True Competence or Bias-Driven Performance?

Large language models (LLMs) in medicine are mainly evaluated using multiple-choice question answering (MCQA), which can overestimate real clinical ability due to guessing strategies and answer biases. To address these limitations, we introduce an expanded and more challenging benchmark based on Polish medical exams, adding over 15,000 questions, two new domains, and four structural modifications that reduce MCQA-specific artifacts and better test reasoning. We evaluate 21 LLMs and show that evaluation design strongly affects results. Under our harder setup, the best model (Qwen3.5-122B) drops by 28.4 and 31 pp on English and Polish exams, respectively. Despite low evidence of data contamination, standard MCQA scores do not reliably reflect true medical competence. To facilitate further research, we make our benchmark publicly available.
Aug 18, 2026

BEAR-Bench: A Bilingual Enterprise and Academic Reasoning Benchmark for Multimodal Models

While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have made significant strides in visual comprehension, their ability to reason about text-dense, professional documents remains incompletely evaluated. Existing benchmarks emphasize information extraction, require external domain knowledge, or cover professional documents only as one of many settings. They are also largely English- or Chinese-centric, leaving other languages and Russian, in particular, substantially underrepresented. To address these limitations, we introduce BEAR-Bench (Bilingual Enterprise and Academic Reasoning), a self-contained, complex English-and-Russian benchmark comprising 1000 human-annotated questions based on text-rich business and scientific documents. We evaluate 16 proprietary and open-weight MLLMs, including Gemini 3.1 Pro and Qwen3.5-397B, on BEAR-Bench and observe clear headroom even for the strongest systems. Finally, we use the resulting model outputs to compare existing hallucination detection methods, evaluating not only how often models fail on BEAR-Bench but also how reliably those failures can be identified.