PRBench: Large-Scale Expert Rubrics for Evaluating High-Stakes Professional Reasoning

ACL ARR 2026 January Submission4404 Authors

Keywords: professional domains, financial reasoning, legal reasoning, rubric, llm evaluation

Abstract: Frontier model progress is often measured using academic benchmarks that provide a limited view of performance on open-ended, economically consequential tasks in high-stakes professional domains where practical returns matter most. We introduce Professional Reasoning Bench (PRBench), a realistic, open-ended, and difficult benchmark of real-world problems in Finance and Law. We open-source its 1,100 expert-authored tasks and 19,356 expert-curated criteria, making it the largest public, rubric-based benchmark for both legal and finance domains. We recruit 182 qualified professionals, holding JDs, CFAs, or 6+ years of experience, who contributed questions inspired by their actual workflows. This process yields significant diversity, with tasks spanning 114 countries and 47 US jurisdictions. Our expert-curated rubrics are validated through a rigorous quality pipeline, including independent expert validation. Subsequent evaluation of 20 leading models reveals substantial room for improvement, with top scores of only 0.39 (Finance) and 0.37 (Legal) on our Hard subsets. We further catalog associated economic impacts of the prompts and analyze performance using human-annotated rubric categories. Common failure modes include inaccurate judgments, a lack of process transparency and incomplete reasoning, highlighting critical gaps in their reliability for professional adoption.

Paper Type: Long

Research Area: Resources and Evaluation

Research Area Keywords: corpus creation; benchmarking; NLP datasets; evaluation methodologies; evaluation

Contribution Types: Data resources

Languages Studied: English

Submission Number: 4404