Aswanth Krishnan

Ishant Kohar, Aswanth Krishnan

Current AI agents excel in familiar settings, but fail sharply when faced with novel tasks with unseen vocabularies -- a core limitation of procedural memory systems. We present the first benchmark that isolates procedural memory retrieval from task execution, evaluating whether agents can recognize functionally equivalent procedures that span different object instantiations. Using ALFWorld, we construct dual corpora of expert and LLM-generated trajectories and evaluate six retrieval methods using systematically stratified queries. Our results expose a clear generalization cliff: embedding-based methods perform strongly on familiar contexts, yet degrade considerably on novel ones, while LLM-generated procedural abstractions demonstrate reliable cross-context transfer. Controlled ablations show that although embeddings capture some lexical-level abstraction, they fundamentally treat procedures as unordered bags of words, discarding temporal structure necessary for cross-context transfer. Corpus scale delivers far larger gains than representation enrichment, revealing an architectural ceiling in current encoders. Our benchmark offers the first diagnostic framework separating genuine procedural understanding from surface-level memorization and gives tools for developing retrieval systems capable of dependable generalization. Resources available at our GitHub repository (https://github.com/qpiai/Proced_mem_bench).

Adrian Mirza, Nawaf Alampara, Sreekanth Kunchapu et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have gained widespread interest due to their ability to process human language and perform tasks on which they have not been explicitly trained. However, we possess only a limited systematic understanding of the chemical capabilities of LLMs, which would be required to improve models and mitigate potential harm. Here, we introduce "ChemBench," an automated framework for evaluating the chemical knowledge and reasoning abilities of state-of-the-art LLMs against the expertise of chemists. We curated more than 2,700 question-answer pairs, evaluated leading open- and closed-source LLMs, and found that the best models outperformed the best human chemists in our study on average. However, the models struggle with some basic tasks and provide overconfident predictions. These findings reveal LLMs' impressive chemical capabilities while emphasizing the need for further research to improve their safety and usefulness. They also suggest adapting chemistry education and show the value of benchmarking frameworks for evaluating LLMs in specific domains.