# AirQA: A Comprehensive QA Dataset for AI Research with Instance-Level Evaluation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.16952 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.16952/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12948/) (2025)
- [Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06180/) (2023)
- [Self-Instruct: Aligning Language Models with Self-Generated Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10560/) (2022)
- [REALM: Retrieval-Augmented Language Model Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08909/) (2020)
- [LlamaFactory: Unified Efficient Fine-Tuning of 100+ Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13372/) (2024)
- [MiniLM: Deep Self-Attention Distillation for Task-Agnostic Compression of Pre-Trained Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10957/) (2020)
- [Improving language models by retrieving from trillions of tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04426/) (2021)
- [PubMedQA: A Dataset for Biomedical Research Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.06146/) (2019)
- [Plan-and-Solve Prompting: Improving Zero-Shot Chain-of-Thought Reasoning by Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04091/) (2023)
- [A Dataset of Information-Seeking Questions and Answers Anchored in Research Papers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03011/) (2021)
- [Understanding the planning of LLM agents: A survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02716/) (2024)
- [What Makes Good Data for Alignment? A Comprehensive Study of Automatic Data Selection in Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.15685/) (2023)
- [AgentTuning: Enabling Generalized Agent Abilities for LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12823/) (2023)
- [MinerU: An Open-Source Solution for Precise Document Content Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18839/) (2024)
- [How Abilities in Large Language Models are Affected by Supervised Fine-tuning Data Composition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05492/) (2023)
- [Language agents achieve superhuman synthesis of scientific knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.13740/) (2024)
- [PaSa: An LLM Agent for Comprehensive Academic Paper Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.10120/) (2025)
- [LitSearch: A Retrieval Benchmark for Scientific Literature Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.18940/) (2024)
- [Facilitating Multi-turn Function Calling for LLMs via Compositional Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.12952/) (2024)
- [Evaluating Open-QA Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12421/) (2023)
- [M3SciQA: A Multi-Modal Multi-Document Scientific QA Benchmark for Evaluating Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.04075/) (2024)
- [PeerQA: A Scientific Question Answering Dataset from Peer Reviews](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13668/) (2025)
- [Reassessing Extractive QA Datasets at Scale: LLM-as-a-Judge and In-Depth Analyses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.11972/) (2025)
- [Dual Instruction Tuning with Large Language Models for Mathematical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18295/) (2024)

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

- [LitTraceQA: A Benchmark for Multi-Stage Grounding and Verification in Scientific Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.07370/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The growing volume of academic papers has made it increasingly difficult for researchers to efficiently extract key information. While large language models (LLMs) based agents are capable of automating question answering (QA) workflows for scientific papers, there still lacks a comprehensive and realistic benchmark to evaluate their capabilities. Moreover, training an interactive agent for this specific task is hindered by the shortage of high-quality interaction trajectories. In this work, we propose AirQA, a human-annotated comprehensive paper QA dataset in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), with 13,956 papers and 1,246 questions, that encompasses multi-task, multi-modal and instance-level evaluation. Furthermore, we propose ExTrActor, an automated framework for instruction data synthesis. With three LLM-based agents, ExTrActor can perform example generation and trajectory collection without human intervention. Evaluations of multiple open-source and proprietary models show that most models underperform on AirQA, demonstrating the quality of our dataset. Extensive experiments confirm that ExTrActor consistently improves the multi-turn tool-use capability of small models, enabling them to achieve performance comparable to larger ones.