# CReSt: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Complex Reasoning over Structured Documents

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.17503 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17503/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Knowledge- and tool-augmented reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 17 of its 18 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 May 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Knowledge- and tool-augmented reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/knowledge-and-tool-augmented-reasoning/)
- Retrieval-augmented generation / [RAG pipeline design and evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/rag/rag-pipeline-design-and-evaluation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [HotpotQA: A Dataset for Diverse, Explainable Multi-hop Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.09600/) (2018)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10997/) (2023)
- [Least-to-Most Prompting Enables Complex Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10625/) (2022)
- [FEVER: a large-scale dataset for Fact Extraction and VERification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05355/) (2018)
- [Enabling Large Language Models to Generate Text with Citations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14627/) (2023)
- [KILT: a Benchmark for Knowledge Intensive Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.02252/) (2020)
- [Plan-and-Solve Prompting: Improving Zero-Shot Chain-of-Thought Reasoning by Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04091/) (2023)
- [A Survey on RAG Meeting LLMs: Towards Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.06211/) (2024)
- [Benchmarking Large Language Models in Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.01431/) (2023)
- [Chain of Draft: Thinking Faster by Writing Less](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.18600/) (2025)
- [Fact, Fetch, and Reason: A Unified Evaluation of Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12941/) (2024)
- [VDocRAG: Retrieval-Augmented Generation over Visually-Rich Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09795/) (2025)
- [CRUD-RAG: A Comprehensive Chinese Benchmark for Retrieval-Augmented Generation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.17043/) (2024)
- [UDA: A Benchmark Suite for Retrieval Augmented Generation in Real-world Document Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15187/) (2024)
- [HtmlRAG: HTML is Better Than Plain Text for Modeling Retrieved Knowledge in RAG Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02959/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Revisiting RAG Retrievers: An Information Theoretic Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.21553/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large Language Models (LLMs) have made substantial progress in recent years, yet evaluating their capabilities in practical Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) scenarios remains challenging. In practical applications, LLMs must demonstrate complex reasoning, refuse to answer appropriately, provide precise citations, and effectively understand document layout. These capabilities are crucial for advanced task handling, uncertainty awareness, maintaining reliability, and structural understanding. While some of the prior works address these aspects individually, there is a need for a unified framework that evaluates them collectively in practical RAG scenarios. To address this, we present CReSt (A Comprehensive Benchmark for Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Complex Reasoning over Structured Documents), a benchmark designed to assess these key dimensions holistically. CReSt comprises 2,245 human-annotated examples in English and Korean, designed to capture practical RAG scenarios that require complex reasoning over structured documents. It also introduces a tailored evaluation methodology to comprehensively assess model performance in these critical areas. Our evaluation shows that even advanced LLMs struggle to perform consistently across these dimensions, underscoring key areas for improvement. We release CReSt to support further research and the development of more robust RAG systems. The dataset and code are available at: https://github.com/UpstageAI/CReSt.