---
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

```json
{
  "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.

```python
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

```bibtex
@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.