English

StressEval: Failure-Driven Dynamic Benchmarking for Knowledge-Intensive Reasoning in Large Language Models

Computation and Language 2026-05-05 v1

Abstract

Static benchmarks for LLMs are increasingly compromised by contamination and overfitting especially on knowledge intensive reasoning tasks While recent dynamic benchmarks can alleviate staleness they often increase difficulty at the expense of answerability and controllability In this paper we propose StressEval a failure driven data synthesis framework that turns observed model failures into dynamic challenging and controllable test instances StressEval consists of three stages first it constructs a semi structured difficulty card that identifies the failed reasoning step and its root cause second it applies a dual perspective instance synthesis method that targets both knowledge gaps and reasoning breakdowns while preserving the underlying difficulty factors and third it applies a gating mechanism to retain only grounded unambiguous instances Seeding from multiple knowledge intensive reasoning datasets we employ StressEval to build Dynamic OneEval a focused suite of challenging dynamic benchmark Across several state of the art LLMs Dynamic OneEval yields substantially larger performance drops than the original benchmarks while retaining explicit difficulty factors enabling more actionable iteration

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.01939,
  title  = {StressEval: Failure-Driven Dynamic Benchmarking for Knowledge-Intensive Reasoning in Large Language Models},
  author = {Yongrui Chen and Yangyang Ma and Xiaoying Huang and Shenyu Zhang and Huajun Chen and Haofen Wang and Guilin Qi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.01939},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Accepted by IJCAI-2026

R2 v1 2026-07-01T12:47:33.328Z