Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) have shown strong performance on mathematical reasoning under well-defined conditions. However, real-world engineering problems involve uncertainty, context, and open-ended settings that extend beyond symbolic computation. Existing benchmarks largely focus on well-defined or abstract reasoning and therefore fail to capture these complexities. We introduce EngiBench, a hierarchical benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs on solving engineering problems. It spans three levels of increasing difficulty (foundational knowledge retrieval, contextual reasoning, and open-ended modeling) and covers diverse engineering subfields. To facilitate a deeper understanding of model performance, we systematically rewrite each problem into three controlled variants (perturbed, knowledge-enhanced, and math abstraction), enabling us to separately evaluate the model’s robustness, domain-specific knowledge, and mathematical reasoning abilities. Experimental results show clear performance stratification across difficulty levels: model accuracy declines with task complexity, degrades under minor perturbations, and remains substantially below human performance on high-level engineering tasks. These findings reveal that current LLMs still lack the high-level reasoning needed for real-world engineering, highlighting the need for future models with deeper and more reliable problem-solving capabilities. Our source code and data are available at https://github.com/AI4Engi/EngiBench.
