THiNK: Can Large Language Models Think-aloud?

Assessing higher-order thinking skills in large language models (LLMs) remains a fundamental challenge, especially in tasks that go beyond surface-level accuracy. In this work, we propose THiNK (Testing Higher-order Notion of Knowledge), a multi-agent, feedback-driven evaluation framework grounded in Bloom's Taxonomy. THiNK frames reasoning assessment as an iterative task of problem generation, critique, and revision, encouraging LLMs to think-aloud through step-by-step reflection and refinement. This enables a systematic evaluation of both lower-order (e.g., remember, understand) and higher-order (e.g., evaluate, create) thinking skills. We apply THiNK to seven state-of-the-art LLMs and perform a detailed cognitive analysis of their outputs. Results reveal that while models reliably perform lower-order categories well, they struggle with applying knowledge in realistic contexts and exhibit limited abstraction. Structured feedback loops significantly improve reasoning performance, particularly in higher-order thinking. Qualitative evaluations further confirm that THiNK-guided outputs better align with domain logic and problem structure. The code of our framework provides a scalable methodology for probing and enhancing LLM reasoning, offering new directions for evaluation grounded in learning science, which is available at our GitHub repository.

WXImpactBench: A Disruptive Weather Impact Understanding Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models

Climate change adaptation requires the understanding of disruptive weather impacts on society, where large language models (LLMs) might be applicable. However, their effectiveness is under-explored due to the difficulty of high-quality corpus collection and the lack of available benchmarks. The climate-related events stored in regional newspapers record how communities adapted and recovered from disasters. However, the processing of the original corpus is non-trivial. In this study, we first develop a disruptive weather impact dataset with a four-stage well-crafted construction pipeline. Then, we propose WXImpactBench, the first benchmark for evaluating the capacity of LLMs on disruptive weather impacts. The benchmark involves two evaluation tasks, multi-label classification and ranking-based question answering. Extensive experiments on evaluating a set of LLMs provide first-hand analysis of the challenges in developing disruptive weather impact understanding and climate change adaptation systems. The constructed dataset and the code for the evaluation framework are available to help society protect against vulnerabilities from disasters.

From Recall to Reasoning: Automated Question Generation for Deeper Math Learning through Large Language Models

Educators have started to turn to Generative AI (GenAI) to help create new course content, but little is known about how they should do so. In this project, we investigated the first steps for optimizing content creation for advanced math. In particular, we looked at the ability of GenAI to produce high-quality practice problems that are relevant to the course content. We conducted two studies to: (1) explore the capabilities of current versions of publicly available GenAI and (2) develop an improved framework to address the limitations we found. Our results showed that GenAI can create math problems at various levels of quality with minimal support, but that providing examples and relevant content results in better quality outputs. This research can help educators decide the ideal way to adopt GenAI in their workflows, to create more effective educational experiences for students.

CodeFlowBench: A Multi-turn, Iterative Benchmark for Complex Code Generation

Real world development demands code that is readable, extensible, and testable by organizing the implementation into modular components and iteratively reuse pre-implemented code. We term this iterative, multi-turn process codeflow and introduce CodeFlowBench, the first benchmark designed for comprehensively evaluating LLMs' ability to perform codeflow, namely to implement new functionality by reusing existing functions over multiple turns. CodeFlowBench comprises 5258 problems drawn from Codeforces and is continuously updated via an automated pipeline that decomposes each problem into a series of function-level subproblems based on its dependency tree and each subproblem is paired with unit tests. We further propose a novel evaluation framework with tasks and metrics tailored to multi-turn code reuse to assess model performance. In experiments across various LLMs under both multi-turn and single-turn patterns. We observe models' poor performance on CodeFlowBench, with a substantial performance drop in the iterative codeflow scenario. For instance, o1-mini achieves a pass@1 of 20.8% in multi-turn pattern versus 37.8% in single-turn pattern. Further analysis shows that different models excel at different dependency depths, yet all struggle to correctly solve structurally complex problems, highlighting challenges for current LLMs to serve as code generation tools when performing codeflow. Overall, CodeFlowBench offers a comprehensive benchmark and new insights into LLM capabilities for multi-turn, iterative code generation, guiding future advances in code generation tasks.

MaintainCoder: Maintainable Code Generation Under Dynamic Requirements

Modern code generation has made significant strides in functional correctness and execution efficiency. However, these systems often overlook a critical dimension in real-world software development: maintainability. To handle dynamic requirements with minimal rework, we propose MaintainCoder as a pioneering solution. It integrates Waterfall model, design patterns, and multi-agent collaboration to systematically enhance cohesion, reduce coupling, and improve adaptability. We also introduce MaintainBench, a benchmark comprising requirement changes and corresponding dynamic metrics on maintainance effort. Experiments demonstrate that existing code generation methods struggle to meet maintainability standards when requirements evolve. In contrast, MaintainCoder improves maintainability metrics by 14-30% with even higher correctness, i.e. pass@k. Our work not only provides the foundation of maintainable code generation, but also highlights the need for more holistic code quality research. Resources: https://github.com/IAAR-Shanghai/MaintainCoder.