PhD Knowledge Not Required: A Reasoning Challenge for Large Language
  Models
Authors: name: Carolyn Jane Anderson; name: Joydeep Biswas; name: Aleksander Boruch-Gruszecki; name: Federico Cassano; name: Molly Q Feldman; name: Arjun Guha; name: Francesca Lucchetti; name: Zixuan Wu
Published: 2025-02-03 18:10:38

Abstract: Existing benchmarks for frontier models often test specialized, ``PhD-level''
knowledge that is difficult for non-experts to grasp. In contrast, we present a
benchmark based on the NPR Sunday Puzzle Challenge that requires only general
knowledge. Our benchmark is challenging for both humans and models, however
correct solutions are easy to verify, and models' mistakes are easy to spot.
  Our work reveals capability gaps that are not evident in existing benchmarks:
OpenAI o1 significantly outperforms other reasoning models that are on par on
benchmarks that test specialized knowledge. Furthermore, our analysis of
reasoning outputs uncovers new kinds of failures. DeepSeek R1, for instance,
often concedes with ``I give up'' before providing an answer that it knows is
wrong. R1 can also be remarkably ``uncertain'' in its output and in rare cases,
it does not ``finish thinking,'' which suggests the need for an inference-time
technique to ``wrap up'' before the context window limit is reached. We also
quantify the effectiveness of reasoning longer with R1 and Gemini Thinking to
identify the point beyond which more reasoning is unlikely to improve accuracy
on our benchmark.