CresOWLve: Benchmarking Creative Problem-Solving Over Real-World Knowledge

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Ismayilzada, Mete, Cuomao, Renqing, Yurshevich, Daniil, Sotnikova, Anna, van der Plas, Lonneke, Bosselut, Antoine
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Ismayilzada, Mete
Cuomao, Renqing
Yurshevich, Daniil
Sotnikova, Anna
van der Plas, Lonneke
Bosselut, Antoine
author_facet Ismayilzada, Mete
Cuomao, Renqing
Yurshevich, Daniil
Sotnikova, Anna
van der Plas, Lonneke
Bosselut, Antoine
contents Creative problem-solving requires combining multiple cognitive abilities, including logical reasoning, lateral thinking, analogy-making, and commonsense knowledge, to discover insights that connect seemingly unrelated pieces of information. However, most existing benchmarks for large language models (LLMs) evaluate only specific components of this process. Moreover, many creativity-oriented benchmarks rely on artificially constructed brainteasers or contrived scenarios that do not reflect how creative problem-solving occurs in real-world settings. To address this gap, we introduce CresOWLve, a benchmark for evaluating creative problem-solving using puzzles grounded in real-world knowledge. Problems in CresOWLve require employing multiple creative thinking strategies, retrieving facts from diverse domains, and creatively combining them to arrive at a solution. Evaluating several frontier non-thinking and thinking LLMs, we show that CresOWLve remains highly challenging. Our analysis reveals a consistent performance gap: models perform substantially better on factual questions than on creative ones (up to a -17% drop). While models can often retrieve the relevant knowledge, they struggle to form the non-obvious creative connections required to integrate this information and arrive at the correct answer.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_03374
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CresOWLve: Benchmarking Creative Problem-Solving Over Real-World Knowledge
Ismayilzada, Mete
Cuomao, Renqing
Yurshevich, Daniil
Sotnikova, Anna
van der Plas, Lonneke
Bosselut, Antoine
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Creative problem-solving requires combining multiple cognitive abilities, including logical reasoning, lateral thinking, analogy-making, and commonsense knowledge, to discover insights that connect seemingly unrelated pieces of information. However, most existing benchmarks for large language models (LLMs) evaluate only specific components of this process. Moreover, many creativity-oriented benchmarks rely on artificially constructed brainteasers or contrived scenarios that do not reflect how creative problem-solving occurs in real-world settings. To address this gap, we introduce CresOWLve, a benchmark for evaluating creative problem-solving using puzzles grounded in real-world knowledge. Problems in CresOWLve require employing multiple creative thinking strategies, retrieving facts from diverse domains, and creatively combining them to arrive at a solution. Evaluating several frontier non-thinking and thinking LLMs, we show that CresOWLve remains highly challenging. Our analysis reveals a consistent performance gap: models perform substantially better on factual questions than on creative ones (up to a -17% drop). While models can often retrieve the relevant knowledge, they struggle to form the non-obvious creative connections required to integrate this information and arrive at the correct answer.
title CresOWLve: Benchmarking Creative Problem-Solving Over Real-World Knowledge
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.03374