# StudyBench: Can Self-Evolution Squeeze Textbooks for Olympiad Capability?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.00787 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.00787/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03300/) (2024)
- [DeepSeek-V4: Towards Highly Efficient Million-Token Context Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.19348/) (2026)
- [ExpeL: LLM Agents Are Experiential Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10144/) (2023)
- [Agentic Context Engineering: Evolving Contexts for Self-Improving Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.04618/) (2025)
- [Absolute Zero: Reinforced Self-play Reasoning with Zero Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.03335/) (2025)
- [R-Zero: Self-Evolving Reasoning LLM from Zero Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.05004/) (2025)
- [LifelongAgentBench: Evaluating LLM Agents as Lifelong Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11942/) (2025)
- [NewtonBench: Benchmarking Generalizable Scientific Law Discovery in LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.07172/) (2025)
- [Learning to Generate Instruction Tuning Datasets for Zero-Shot Task Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18334/) (2024)
- [StoryBench: A Dynamic Benchmark for Evaluating Long-Term Memory with Multi Turns](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.13356/) (2025)
- [Frontier-Eng: Benchmarking Self-Evolving Agents on Real-World Engineering Tasks with Generative Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.12290/) (2026)
- [EvaLearn: Quantifying the Learning Capability and Efficiency of LLMs via Sequential Problem Solving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02672/) (2025)
- [ToolOmni: Enabling Open-World Tool Use via Agentic learning with Proactive Retrieval and Grounded Execution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.13787/) (2026)
- [SE-Bench: Benchmarking Self-Evolution with Knowledge Internalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.04811/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Humans need to study only a handful of well-written textbooks to master a discipline and attempt its hardest problems. We argue that an ideal self-evolution method should share the same property, that is autonomously learning from raw training material for transferable problem-solving capability. However, we still lack a direct measurement for it. We introduce StudyBench, a controlled physics benchmark that directly measures how efficiently a self-evolution method converts training material into capability. We organise the test set into an Application Set, consisting of difficult textbook problems and evaluating absorption ability, and a Transfer Set, consisting of olympiad-level problems and evaluating transfer ability. Benchmarking representative self-evolution methods across three base models, we find that improvements on the Application Set rarely translate to the harder Transfer Set. A guidance ablation exposes a Guidance Gap: even the strongest method closes only a small fraction of what the same material unlocks when supplied as in-context guidance. Besides, every method hits a Compute Plateau, saturating well before exhausting its compute budget. The remaining gap is therefore a method problem rather than a data or compute problem. By offering a clean and controlled benchmark, StudyBench turns self-evolution progress from an open-ended pursuit into a measurable target for future research. Our code is released at https://github.com/thunlp/StudyBench.