StudyBench: Can Self-Evolution Squeeze Textbooks for Olympiad Capability?
Researchers introduce StudyBench, a physics benchmark showing self-evolution gains on textbook problems rarely transfer to olympiad-level questions.
StudyBench is a controlled physics benchmark splitting test data into an Application Set of difficult textbook problems and a Transfer Set of olympiad-level problems. Across three base models, representative self-evolution methods improved on the Application Set but rarely transferred to the harder Transfer Set. A guidance ablation reveals a Guidance Gap, and every method hits a Compute Plateau, indicating the remaining limits are method problems rather than data or compute problems.