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LifeSciBench: Evaluating Language Models on Realistic, Expert-Level Tasks in the Life Sciences

Created on 19 Aug 2026

Authors

Liu, A., Ho, A., Droste, A. M., Martin, D., Wong, E., Zhou, E., Zhou, I., Park, J., Jiao, J., Skelly, K.-R., Kim, K., Li, J., Rao, K., Uehara, M., Marion, M., Fitzgerald, N., Dias, R., Shringarpure, S., Yuan, Y., Wang, Y.

Abstract

We introduce LifeSciBench, a benchmark of 750 expert-authored tasks designed to evaluate whether language models can handle realistic life science research work. The majority of existing life sciences benchmarks have a narrow scope or are purely knowledge-based, and therefore fail to capture the complexity of real-world research, which often involves ambiguities and requires the accurate execution of multiple dependent judgment calls. Additionally, almost all existing benchmarks span at best a small collection of subdomains within the life sciences; there is at present no existing life sciences benchmark with both the requisite breadth and depth required to convincingly measure proficiency in real-world professional research settings. LifeSciBench addresses this gap by spanning seven representative scientific workflows and seven life science domains, with each constituent task paired with a human expert-written rubric. Across five frontier and domain-specialized models, GPT-Rosalind performs best, with a task-weighted mean normalized rubric score of 0.576 and a task-weighted response pass rate of 36.1% (response-level values are first averaged within each task, and the resulting task-level values are then averaged with equal weight). LifeSciBench remains unsaturated, with 171 tasks (22.8%) having no observed passing response from any evaluated model and 261 tasks (34.8%) having a best-model pass rate below 20%. LifeSciBench therefore serves as a high-resolution evaluation of practical scientific reasoning and operational decision-making in the life sciences.

Preprint server: bioRxiv
The authors list and abstract were imported from bioRxiv on 19 Aug 2026.

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