Execution-grounded evaluation reveals hidden failures in language-model calculations for environmental science
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Computer Science > Computation and Language
Title:Execution-grounded evaluation reveals hidden failures in language-model calculations for environmental science
Abstract:Large language models are increasingly used for quantitative work in the environmental sciences, yet existing evaluations score only final answers, leaving calculation process unobserved. Here we introduce AtmosCoder-Bench, an execution-grounded benchmark that makes the calculation process visible. Built through a transferable semi-automated pipeline (436 problems, 3,910 variants, 7,029 graded quantities), every problem is validated to be unambiguous and human-solvable, with uniquely verifiable answers. We find that (i) multiple-choice formats inflate measured accuracy by at least 12 percentage points; (ii) many failures arise not from missing knowledge but from models failing to apply known formulas and constraints consistently throughout multi-step computation; and (iii) even frontier models remain weak when task-specific conditions invalidate familiar methods, often reverting to canonical solution patterns rather than adapting methods to the relevant physical regime, leaving expert oversight essential.
| Comments: | 29 pages, 4 figures, 2 tables, plus supplementary materials. Maohao Ran and Chendong Ma contributed equally. Corresponding author: Jun Song (junsong@hkbu.this http URL). Code: this https URL |
| Subjects: | Computation and Language (cs.CL) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2608.18726 [cs.CL] |
| (or arXiv:2608.18726v1 [cs.CL] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.18726
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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