ICML2026

XDomainBench: Diagnosing Reasoning Collapse in High-Dimensional Scientific Knowledge Composition

Zhiren Gong, Tiantong Wu, Jiaming Zhang, Fuyao Zhang, CHE WANG, Yurong Hao, Yikun Hou, Foo Ping, Yilei Zhao, Fei Huang, Chau Yuen, Wei Yang Bryan Lim

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed for knowledge synthesis, yet their capacity for compositional generalization in scientific knowledge remains under-characterized. Existing benchmarks primarily focus on singleturn restricted scenarios, failing to capture the capability boundaries exposed by real-world interactive scientific workflows. To address this, we introduce XDOMAINBENCH, a diagnostic benchmark for interactive interdisciplinary scientific reasoning. We formalize the composition order and mixture structure to enable systematic stresstesting from single-discipline to inter-disciplinary, comprising 8,598 interactive sessions across 20 domains and 4 task categories, with 8 realistic trajectory patterns covering difficulty and domainmixture dynamics, simulating real AI4S scenarios. Large-scale evaluation of LLMs reveals a systematic reasoning collapse as composition order increases, stemming from two root causes: (i) direct difficulty increases induced by domain composition, and (ii) indirect interaction-amplified failures where trajectory patterns trigger error accumulation, reasoning breaks, and domain confusion, ultimately leading to session collapse. We have code in GitHub repository, project page in XDomainBench, and dataset in Hugging Face.