HiBench: Benchmarking LLMs Capability on Hierarchical Structure Reasoning

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Main Authors: Jiang, Zhuohang, Wu, Pangjing, Liang, Ziran, Chen, Peter Q., Yuan, Xu, Jia, Ye, Tu, Jiancheng, Li, Chen, Ng, Peter H. F., Li, Qing
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Jiang, Zhuohang
Wu, Pangjing
Liang, Ziran
Chen, Peter Q.
Yuan, Xu
Jia, Ye
Tu, Jiancheng
Li, Chen
Ng, Peter H. F.
Li, Qing
author_facet Jiang, Zhuohang
Wu, Pangjing
Liang, Ziran
Chen, Peter Q.
Yuan, Xu
Jia, Ye
Tu, Jiancheng
Li, Chen
Ng, Peter H. F.
Li, Qing
contents Structure reasoning is a fundamental capability of large language models (LLMs), enabling them to reason about structured commonsense and answer multi-hop questions. However, existing benchmarks for structure reasoning mainly focus on horizontal and coordinate structures (\emph{e.g.} graphs), overlooking the hierarchical relationships within them. Hierarchical structure reasoning is crucial for human cognition, particularly in memory organization and problem-solving. It also plays a key role in various real-world tasks, such as information extraction and decision-making. To address this gap, we propose HiBench, the first framework spanning from initial structure generation to final proficiency assessment, designed to benchmark the hierarchical reasoning capabilities of LLMs systematically. HiBench encompasses six representative scenarios, covering both fundamental and practical aspects, and consists of 30 tasks with varying hierarchical complexity, totaling 39,519 queries. To evaluate LLMs comprehensively, we develop five capability dimensions that depict different facets of hierarchical structure understanding. Through extensive evaluation of 20 LLMs from 10 model families, we reveal key insights into their capabilities and limitations: 1) existing LLMs show proficiency in basic hierarchical reasoning tasks; 2) they still struggle with more complex structures and implicit hierarchical representations, especially in structural modification and textual reasoning. Based on these findings, we create a small yet well-designed instruction dataset, which enhances LLMs' performance on HiBench by an average of 88.84\% (Llama-3.1-8B) and 31.38\% (Qwen2.5-7B) across all tasks. The HiBench dataset and toolkit are available here, https://github.com/jzzzzh/HiBench, to encourage evaluation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_00912
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle HiBench: Benchmarking LLMs Capability on Hierarchical Structure Reasoning
Jiang, Zhuohang
Wu, Pangjing
Liang, Ziran
Chen, Peter Q.
Yuan, Xu
Jia, Ye
Tu, Jiancheng
Li, Chen
Ng, Peter H. F.
Li, Qing
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Structure reasoning is a fundamental capability of large language models (LLMs), enabling them to reason about structured commonsense and answer multi-hop questions. However, existing benchmarks for structure reasoning mainly focus on horizontal and coordinate structures (\emph{e.g.} graphs), overlooking the hierarchical relationships within them. Hierarchical structure reasoning is crucial for human cognition, particularly in memory organization and problem-solving. It also plays a key role in various real-world tasks, such as information extraction and decision-making. To address this gap, we propose HiBench, the first framework spanning from initial structure generation to final proficiency assessment, designed to benchmark the hierarchical reasoning capabilities of LLMs systematically. HiBench encompasses six representative scenarios, covering both fundamental and practical aspects, and consists of 30 tasks with varying hierarchical complexity, totaling 39,519 queries. To evaluate LLMs comprehensively, we develop five capability dimensions that depict different facets of hierarchical structure understanding. Through extensive evaluation of 20 LLMs from 10 model families, we reveal key insights into their capabilities and limitations: 1) existing LLMs show proficiency in basic hierarchical reasoning tasks; 2) they still struggle with more complex structures and implicit hierarchical representations, especially in structural modification and textual reasoning. Based on these findings, we create a small yet well-designed instruction dataset, which enhances LLMs' performance on HiBench by an average of 88.84\% (Llama-3.1-8B) and 31.38\% (Qwen2.5-7B) across all tasks. The HiBench dataset and toolkit are available here, https://github.com/jzzzzh/HiBench, to encourage evaluation.
title HiBench: Benchmarking LLMs Capability on Hierarchical Structure Reasoning
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.00912