REVIEW 4 major objections 6 minor 3 cited by
AraSTEM: A Native Arabic Multiple Choice Question Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs Knowledge In STEM Subjects
T0 review · 4 major / 6 minor · reviewed 2026-08-10 · deepseek-v4-flash
Pith's one-line read AraSTEM: a new native Arabic STEM benchmark that publicly available LLMs struggle with, where the best model reaches only 56% average accuracy and accuracy scales with Arabic training data more than with model size.
desk verdict Useful Arabic STEM benchmark, but question validity and release are unverified; deserves a serious referee with expectations of major revision. read the letter →
The pith
A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.
The reading
What carries the argument
The central object is the benchmark itself: 11,637 multiple-choice questions with per-question source citations, cleaned by removing images and mathematical equations, labeled by educational level and subject, and carrying two to four answer options. The evaluation machinery is a fixed English Chain-of-Thought prompt that states the subject and level, with the model's answer read from the softmax probability of the A/B/C/D tokens. This setup lets the authors attribute differences in accuracy to model knowledge rather than to prompt wording—the claim being tested—and its output is a per-subject and per-level accuracy table that supports comparisons across model families and sizes.
What would settle it
Take a stratified random sample of AraSTEM questions whose original sources contained images or equations, present the cleaned text-only versions to Arabic-speaking STEM experts, and measure their agreement with the dataset's answer key; if expert accuracy falls well below the 56% model ceiling or experts flag many questions as unanswerable, the benchmark's claim to measure knowledge rather than prompt quality collapses. A complementary check is to restore the original images or equations to the same sample and test whether top models' accuracy rises materially.
Extended reading notes
Core claim
The paper's discovery is that a large, native Arabic STEM MCQ collection produces a wide, structured performance spread across open models, with accuracy tracking the amount of Arabic training data more than model size. The top performers are Jais, Llama 3.1 Instruct, AceGPT, and Bloomz, while general-purpose large models like Falcon 40B and Llama 2 lag noticeably. The paper also shows that model predictions are complementary—only 193 questions stumped every tested model—and that the leading models are generally overconfident except Llama 3.1, which calibrates well. These results are presented as evidence for the value of Arabic-centric training and the need for localized evaluation.
Load-bearing premise
After images and equations were stripped from scraped questions, each remaining question must still be self-contained and answerable from the Arabic text alone; if many questions became ambiguous or unanswerable, the reported accuracy gaps would reflect broken prompts rather than knowledge, and the answer key's correctness also rests on external sources and ChatGPT-4 extraction without independent human validation.
Editorial extensions
If this is right
- Models trained with a larger share of Arabic data, such as Jais and AceGPT, outperform equally sized models with less Arabic exposure, implying that scaling Arabic tokens in pretraining is a direct lever on Arabic STEM accuracy.
- Instruction fine-tuning consistently improves AraSTEM accuracy, as seen in Jais chat versus base and Llama 3.1 Instruct versus base, so alignment helps even in zero-shot knowledge tasks.
- The 193-question hard-failure set, concentrated in dentistry and medicine, marks a concrete target for specialized Arabic medical knowledge.
- Because models' correct answers overlap only partially, an ensemble of the top models would score higher than any single model, offering a practical path to better Arabic STEM question answering.
Reading between the lines
- The removal of images and equations is the fragile point: the reported numbers measure text-only STEM knowledge, and restoring original figures could raise model accuracy, meaning the benchmark may understate full multimodal competence.
- The paper does not include a human expert baseline; without one, 'challenging' is anchored only to random guessing and model scores, so a small stratified human evaluation would let the field interpret the 56% figure.
- AraSTEM could double as a training resource, not just an exam: the labeled questions could support Arabic STEM instruction tuning, and the per-subject difficulty profiles could guide curriculum design for localized models.
- The per-question source citations give the benchmark a traceability that many English benchmarks lack, a contribution the paper mentions but does not emphasize as a finding.
Editorial analysis
A structured set of objections, weighed in public.
Referee Report
Summary. The paper introduces AraSTEM, a multiple-choice question benchmark of 11,637 Arabic STEM questions spanning primary, secondary, and college levels across subjects including math, science, physics, chemistry, biology, IT, medicine, dentistry, and pharmacy. The questions were collected from web scraping, manual extraction from books, and ChatGPT-4-assisted extraction from PDFs. The authors evaluate a range of open-source LLMs in a zero-shot setting with an English chain-of-thought prompt and report that the best-performing open-source model, Jais 30B Chat V3, reaches 56% accuracy (with Table 4 reporting 58%), well above random guessing but far from ceiling. The dataset is offered on Hugging Face with per-question source links.
Significance. If the benchmark is valid, it addresses a real gap: most knowledge benchmarks are English-centric, and Arabic STEM evaluation is underrepresented. The dataset's size, source traceability, and subject breadth are genuine strengths, as is the evaluation of many model families and sizes. The paper also includes useful auxiliary analyses of tokenizer coverage, calibration, and complementary model errors. However, the central claim that low model accuracy reflects a knowledge gap depends on the cleaned text-only questions being self-contained and correctly labeled; this is not currently established. The reported numerical inconsistencies and the absence of a human-expert validation loop weaken the support for the main conclusion. With a validation study and corrected reporting, the benchmark could be a valuable community resource.
major comments (4)
- [Section 3.1] The cleaning process removed images and mathematical equations from scraped questions, but the paper does not establish that the remaining Arabic text alone makes each question self-contained and unambiguously answerable. This is load-bearing because if a nontrivial fraction of questions originally relied on diagrams, graphs, or formulas, the reported accuracies (e.g., Jais 30B Chat V3 at 56–58%) would measure unparseable or misleading prompts rather than STEM knowledge. Please add a human-expert validation step, at least on a stratified sample, that reports the fraction of questions judged answerable from the text alone, and repair or remove items that fail this check.
- [Section 3.1 / Table 1] Gold labels are not independently verified for correctness. The 1,806 questions extracted with ChatGPT-4 from PDFs were proofread for format rather than correctness, and the manual transformation of definition and fill-in-the-blank questions into MCQs could have introduced wrong answers. Without a double-annotated human sample with agreement statistics, the evaluation numbers may reflect errors in the reference answers rather than model knowledge. Please include a label-quality audit, for example a random sample of 200–500 questions annotated by Arabic-speaking STEM experts, with inter-annotator agreement and a report of how disagreements were resolved.
- [Section 4.5 and Tables 4/5] Several reported numbers are inconsistent. Section 4.5 describes 193 hard-failure questions as '0.16%' of the dataset, but 193/11,637 is 1.66%. Table 4 gives Jais 30B Chat V3 an average of 0.58 while Table 5 gives 0.56 and the abstract states 56%; the random-guess baselines also differ between tables (0.30 in Table 4 vs 0.29 in Table 5). Please reconcile these values and provide the evaluation script or per-question scores to make the results reproducible and to confirm which summary is the final one.
- [Section 4] The scoring procedure is underspecified for questions with two or three options. The paper states that models' choices were extracted as the probability of tokens 'A', 'B', 'C', or 'D', but Table 3 shows 2,562 questions with only two options and 3,808 questions with three options. Additionally, the prompt in Figure 7 asks for a 'Correct option number' while scoring uses option letters, and Section 4 says prompts exceeding a model's maximum input size were truncated, which could remove part of the question or the options. Please clarify how variable option counts were mapped to the answer extraction and report how many prompts were truncated.
minor comments (6)
- [Abstract] The abstract contains a typo: 'asses' should be 'assess'.
- [Section 1] 'The rest of this manuscript is organized as following' should be 'as follows', and 'it's details' should be 'its details'.
- [Table 4] The column header 'Collage' should be 'College'.
- [Section 4.2] The model name 'Lama 3.1' should be spelled 'Llama 3.1'.
- [References] Reference [7] contains a garbled sentence with '¡br/¿' and 'doesnt'; the entry needs to be cleaned. Reference [22] has a malformed author field, and reference [29] has inconsistent capitalization and spacing ('ZINI', 'A W AD').
- [Footnote 1] The availability statement is inconsistent: the abstract says the dataset is freely accessible on Hugging Face, while the footnote says 'Available post publication'. Please clarify the current availability status.
Circularity Check
No significant circularity: AraSTEM is an externally sourced MCQ benchmark evaluated zero-shot, and the self-citations are background only.
full rationale
AraSTEM is a dataset-construction and zero-shot benchmark-evaluation paper: it reports accuracy of fixed public models on a fixed external MCQ collection. There are no fitted parameters, no derived quantities that equal their inputs by construction, and no prediction that reduces to a fitted value. The only potentially self-referential element is the use of ChatGPT-4 as an OCR/extraction tool for 1,806 medical questions from PDF files (Section 3.1); those questions originate from external medical colloquiums, ChatGPT-4 is not among the evaluated models, and the extraction was manually proofread, so the benchmark claim is not defined in terms of the model being benchmarked. The self-citations ([17], [20], [29]) appear in related work and future work only and are not load-bearing for the central claim that open models score around 56%. Therefore no circularity is present.
Assumptions & free parameters
assumptions (3)
- domain assumption The external sources (websites and books) provide correct answers for the questions.
- domain assumption The extraction pipeline (scraping, manual conversion, ChatGPT-4-based OCR with proofreading) preserves the questions' intended meaning after removal of images and equations.
- domain assumption The zero-shot evaluation via next-token probability over A/B/C/D accurately captures model performance.
Cite this review
Pith. "Pith review of AraSTEM: A Native Arabic Multiple Choice Question Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs Knowledge In STEM Subjects." pith.science (2026). https://pith.science/paper/M2RDTAFX
@misc{pith2026250100559,
author = {Pith},
title = {Pith review of: AraSTEM: A Native Arabic Multiple Choice Question Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs Knowledge In STEM Subjects},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {\url{https://pith.science/paper/M2RDTAFX}},
note = {Machine review of arXiv:2501.00559}
}
read the original abstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities, not only in generating human-like text, but also in acquiring knowledge. This highlights the need to go beyond the typical Natural Language Processing downstream benchmarks and asses the various aspects of LLMs including knowledge and reasoning. Numerous benchmarks have been developed to evaluate LLMs knowledge, but they predominantly focus on the English language. Given that many LLMs are multilingual, relying solely on benchmarking English knowledge is insufficient. To address this issue, we introduce AraSTEM, a new Arabic multiple-choice question dataset aimed at evaluating LLMs knowledge in STEM subjects. The dataset spans a range of topics at different levels which requires models to demonstrate a deep understanding of scientific Arabic in order to achieve high accuracy. Our findings show that publicly available models of varying sizes struggle with this dataset, and underscores the need for more localized language models. The dataset is freely accessible on Hugging Face.
Figures
Figures from the paper (8 more)
Forward citations
Cited by 3 Pith papers
-
3LM: Bridging Arabic, STEM, and Code through Benchmarking
3LM provides open Arabic benchmarks for native and synthetic STEM multiple-choice questions and translated HumanEval/MBPP code tasks, with evaluations of 40 models.
-
ARB: A Comprehensive Arabic Multimodal Reasoning Benchmark
ARB provides 1,356 Arabic multimodal questions with 5,119 human-reviewed reasoning steps and shows leading models score much higher on reasoning fluency than on correct answers.
-
From Guidelines to Practice: A New Paradigm for Arabic Language Model Evaluation
On a new 490-question Arabic depth dataset, Claude 3.5 Sonnet answered about 30 percent correctly, while GPT-4 answered about 9 percent, showing current models are weak on culturally specialized Arabic knowledge.
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