# ScienceArena: Benchmarking LLMs on Latest Scientific Olympiad Competitions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30517 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.30517/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Mathematical reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 15 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Aug 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Mathematical reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/mathematical-reasoning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03300/) (2020)
- [GPQA: A Graduate-Level Google-Proof Q&A Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12022/) (2023)
- [MMMU: A Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding and Reasoning Benchmark for Expert AGI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16502/) (2023)
- [LiveCodeBench: Holistic and Contamination Free Evaluation of Large Language Models for Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07974/) (2024)
- [Learn to Explain: Multimodal Reasoning via Thought Chains for Science Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09513/) (2022)
- [MathVista: Evaluating Mathematical Reasoning of Foundation Models in Visual Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.02255/) (2023)
- [Chatbot Arena: An Open Platform for Evaluating LLMs by Human Preference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04132/) (2024)
- [OlympiadBench: A Challenging Benchmark for Promoting AGI with Olympiad-Level Bilingual Multimodal Scientific Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14008/) (2024)
- [From Crowdsourced Data to High-Quality Benchmarks: Arena-Hard and BenchBuilder Pipeline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11939/) (2024)
- [MathArena: Evaluating LLMs on Uncontaminated Math Competitions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23281/) (2025)
- [LAB-Bench: Measuring Capabilities of Language Models for Biology Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10362/) (2024)
- [OlympicArena: Benchmarking Multi-discipline Cognitive Reasoning for Superintelligent AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12753/) (2024)
- [SciArena: An Open Evaluation Platform for Non-Verifiable Scientific Literature-Grounded Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.01001/) (2025)
- [HiPhO: How Far Are (M)LLMs from Humans in the Latest High School Physics Olympiad Benchmark?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.07894/) (2025)
- [PhysicsArena: The First Multimodal Physics Reasoning Benchmark Exploring Variable, Process, and Solution Dimensions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15472/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Benchmark saturation and data contamination increasingly obscure genuine scientific reasoning in frontier LLMs. We introduce textscScienceArena, an olympiad-style benchmark from thirteen public science competitions in physics, chemistry, and biology, including IPhO and IChO 2025--2026, IBO 2023, USAPhO 2026, and USNCO 2025. Its open-ended, multi-step problems use process-credit rubrics, making faithful scoring difficult. We build ScienceArena through an expert-audited digitization pipeline that converts official exams, figures, solutions, and rubrics into structured items verified by olympiad medalists. To scale evaluation beyond costly human grading, we calibrate LLM-as-judge against medalist ground truth on archived answers from five models across IPhO and IChO; two strong judges stay within one point of expert total scores. Medalist notes show that failures often stem from visual grounding, structure fidelity, and global problem control rather than missing terminology. Evaluating fourteen recent LLMs with interleaved solving, we find that top models obtain medal-equivalent rubric scores on several public international exams, while chemistry and long-horizon consistency remain key bottlenecks. We provide an interactive hrefhttps://science-arena.onrender.com/demo.