{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/dsr-bench-evaluating-the-structural-reasoning","title":"DSR-Bench: Evaluating the Structural Reasoning Abilities of LLMs via Data Structures","arxiv_id":"2505.24069","date":"2025-05-29","proceeding":null,"authors":["Yu He","Yingxi Li","Colin White","Ellen Vitercik"],"abstract":"Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed for real-world tasks that fundamentally involve data manipulation. A core requirement across these tasks is the ability to perform structural reasoning--that is, to understand and reason about data relationships. For example, customer requests require a temporal ordering, which can be represented by data structures such as queues. However, existing benchmarks primarily focus on high-level, application-driven evaluations without isolating this fundamental capability. To address this gap, we introduce DSR-Bench, a novel benchmark evaluating LLMs' structural reasoning capabilities through data structures, which provide interpretable representations of data relationships. DSR-Bench includes 20 data structures, 35 operations, and 4,140 problem instances, organized hierarchically for fine-grained analysis of reasoning limitations. Our evaluation pipeline is fully automated and deterministic, eliminating subjective human or model-based judgments. Its synthetic nature also ensures scalability and minimizes data contamination risks. We benchmark nine state-of-the-art LLMs. Our analysis shows that instruction-tuned models struggle with basic multi-attribute and multi-hop reasoning. Furthermore, while reasoning-oriented models perform better, they remain fragile on complex and hybrid structures, with the best model achieving an average score of only 47% on the challenge subset. Crucially, models often perform poorly on multi-dimensional data and natural language task descriptions, highlighting a critical gap for real-world deployment.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.24069v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.24069v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"dsr-bench-evaluating-the-structural-reasoning","repo_url":"https://github.com/dransyhe/dsr-bench","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"attribute","task_name":"Attribute"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"focus","method_name":"Focus"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2505.24069","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}