Can AI Validate Science? Benchmarking LLMs on Claim →Evidence Reasoning in AI Papers
Shashidhar Reddy Javaji, Yupeng Cao, Haohang Li, Yangyang Yu, Nikhil Muralidhar, Zining Zhu
Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being used for complex research tasks such as literature review, idea generation, and scientific paper analysis, yet their ability to truly understand and process the intricate relationships within complex research papers, such as the logical links between claims and supporting evidence remains largely unexplored. In this study, we present CLAIM-BENCH, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating LLMs’ capabilities in scientific claim-evidence extraction and validation, a task that reflects deeper comprehension of scientific argumentation. We systematically compare three approaches which are inspired by divide and conquer approaches, across six diverse LLMs, highlighting model-specific strengths and weaknesses in scientific comprehension. Through evaluation involving over 300 claim-evidence pairs across multiple research domains, we reveal significant limitations in LLMs’ ability to process complex scientific content. Our results demonstrate that closed-source models like GPT-4 and Claude consistently outperform open-source counterparts in precision and recall across claim-evidence identification tasks. Furthermore, strategically designed three-pass and one-by-one prompting approaches significantly improve LLMs’ abilities to accurately link dispersed evidence with claims, although this comes at increased computational cost. CLAIM-BENCH sets a new standard for evaluating scientific comprehension in LLMs, offering both a diagnostic tool and a path forward for building systems capable of deeper, more reliable reasoning across full-length papers.- Anthology ID:
- 2025.ijcnlp-long.127
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
- Month:
- December
- Year:
- 2025
- Address:
- Mumbai, India
- Editors:
- Kentaro Inui, Sakriani Sakti, Haofen Wang, Derek F. Wong, Pushpak Bhattacharyya, Biplab Banerjee, Asif Ekbal, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Dhirendra Pratap Singh
- Venues:
- IJCNLP | AACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and The Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 2355–2379
- Language:
- URL:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.ijcnlp-long.127/
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Shashidhar Reddy Javaji, Yupeng Cao, Haohang Li, Yangyang Yu, Nikhil Muralidhar, and Zining Zhu. 2025. Can AI Validate Science? Benchmarking LLMs on Claim →Evidence Reasoning in AI Papers. In Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 2355–2379, Mumbai, India. The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and The Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Can AI Validate Science? Benchmarking LLMs on Claim →Evidence Reasoning in AI Papers (Javaji et al., IJCNLP-AACL 2025)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.ijcnlp-long.127.pdf