Datasets:

lin99
/

ProBench

license: cc-by-sa-4.0
task_categories:
  - question-answering
  - text-generation
language:
  - en
tags:
  - benchmark
  - professional
  - expert
  - reasoning
  - law
  - medicine
  - finance
  - cybersecurity
  - engineering
  - llm-evaluation
  - multiple-choice
size_categories:
  - 1K<n<10K

ProBench

A 4-choice multiple-choice benchmark of 529 expert-level questions across five professional domains, sourced entirely from Stack Exchange communities (CC-BY-SA 4.0). Designed to evaluate LLMs where standard benchmarks (MMLU, HumanEval, HellaSwag) are now saturated above 90%.

Why ProBench?

Benchmark	Frontier model score	Status
MMLU	>90%	Saturated
HellaSwag	>95%	Saturated
HumanEval	>90%	Saturated
ProBench	TBD	Active

Questions are sourced from real professional practitioners. Correct answers are community-verified (Stack Exchange accepted answers with high vote scores). Distractors are real expert-written text from the same domain — not synthetically generated.

Dataset Structure

Splits

Split	Count
train	370
validation	79
test	80
Total	529

By Domain

Domain	Source Community	Items
Cybersecurity	security.stackexchange.com	148
Law	law.stackexchange.com	121
Medicine	medicalsciences.stackexchange.com	63
Engineering	engineering.stackexchange.com	113
Finance	quant.stackexchange.com	84

Record Format

{
  "id": "cybersecurity_29988",
  "domain": "cybersecurity",
  "question_title": "What is certificate pinning?",
  "question_body": "I've recently seen ...",
  "question_score": 373,
  "question_tags": ["tls", "certificates", "public-key-infrastructure"],
  "choices": {
    "A": "You can roll your own, but you probably will make a major security...",
    "B": "Software is too complex. This is by far the most important factor...",
    "C": "The known_hosts file lets the client authenticate the server...",
    "D": "Typically certificates are validated by checking the signature hierarchy..."
  },
  "answer": "D",
  "distractor_source": "same_domain_answer_pool",
  "source": "stackexchange",
  "license": "CC-BY-SA 4.0",
  "url": "https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/29988/..."
}

Evaluation

Evaluation is exact-match (0 or 1 per question) — fully automated, no human judge required.

from datasets import load_dataset

ds = load_dataset("lin99/ProBench", split="test")

def evaluate(model, dataset):
    correct = 0
    for row in dataset:
        prompt = f"""Domain: {row['domain']}

Question: {row['question_title']}

{row['question_body']}

A. {row['choices']['A']}
B. {row['choices']['B']}
C. {row['choices']['C']}
D. {row['choices']['D']}

Answer (A/B/C/D):"""
        prediction = model(prompt).strip()[0].upper()
        if prediction == row["answer"]:
            correct += 1
    return correct / len(dataset)

accuracy = evaluate(your_model, ds)
print(f"ProBench accuracy: {accuracy:.1%}")

Quality Filters

Filter	Threshold
Minimum question score	10 upvotes
Minimum answer score	5 upvotes
Accepted answers only	Yes
Minimum answer length	30 words
Excluded question types	lifestyle, resource lists, book recommendations, tooling

Data Collection

Source: Stack Exchange API + data dump (archive.org, 2024-12-31 release)
License: CC-BY-SA 4.0 — free to use with attribution
Distractors: Real expert-written answers from other questions in the same domain
No synthetic generation: every word in every answer comes from a real human expert

Citation

@dataset{probench2025,
  title     = {ProBench: Expert-Level MCQ Benchmark across 5 Professional Domains},
  year      = {2025},
  note      = {Sourced from Stack Exchange communities (CC-BY-SA 4.0)},
  url       = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/lin99/ProBench}
}

@misc{stackexchange_dump2024,
  title  = {Stack Exchange Data Dump},
  author = {{Stack Exchange, Inc.}},
  year   = {2024},
  url    = {https://archive.org/details/stackexchange},
  note   = {Licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0}
}

License

All content is from Stack Exchange and licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0. Attribution to Stack Exchange communities is required. Each record includes the original URL.