IndustryBench: Probing the Industrial Knowledge Boundaries of LLMs
2026-05-11 • Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence
AI summaryⓘ
The authors created IndustryBench, a large test set designed to check how well language models answer industrial procurement questions following Chinese national standards. They found that many AI-generated answers seem correct but contain safety issues that typical tests miss. Their evaluation separates basic correctness from safety checks, revealing that models struggle especially with standards and terminology, and that longer answers often introduce unsafe details. This work suggests that testing industrial AI requires careful, safety-focused evaluation beyond simple accuracy.
industrial procurementlarge language modelsChinese national standardssafety violationbenchmarkQA evaluationstandards and terminologyexternal verificationmultilingualreasoning in AI
Authors
Songlin Bai, Xintong Wang, Linlin Yu, Bin Chen, Zhiang Xu, Yuyang Sheng, Changtong Zan, Xiaofeng Zhu, Yizhe Zhang, Jiru Li, Mingze Guo, Ling Zou, Yalong Li, Chengfu Huo, Liang Ding
Abstract
In industrial procurement, an LLM answer is useful only if it survives a standards check: recommended material must match operating condition, every parameter must respect a regulated threshold, and no procedure may contradict a safety clause. Partial correctness can mask safety-critical contradictions that aggregate LLM benchmarks rarely capture. We introduce IndustryBench, a 2,049-item benchmark for industrial procurement QA in Chinese, grounded in Chinese national standards (GB/T) and structured industrial product records, organized by seven capability dimensions, ten industry categories, and panel-derived difficulty tiers, with item-aligned English, Russian, and Vietnamese renderings. Our construction pipeline rejects 70.3% of LLM-generated candidates at a search-based external-verification stage, calibrating how unreliable industrial QA remains after LLM-only filtering.Our evaluation decouples raw correctness, scored by a Qwen3-Max judge validated at $κ_w = 0.798$ against a domain expert, from a separate safety-violation (SV) check against source texts. Across 17 models in Chinese and an 8-model intersection over four languages, we find: (i) the best system reaches only 2.083 on the 0--3 rubric, leaving substantial headroom; (ii) Standards & Terminology is the most persistent capability weakness and survives item-aligned translation; (iii) extended reasoning lowers safety-adjusted scores for 12 of 13 models, primarily by introducing unsupported safety-critical details into longer final answers; and (iv) safety-violation rates reshuffle the leaderboard -- GPT-5.4 climbs from rank 6 to rank 3 after SV adjustment, while Kimi-k2.5-1T-A32B drops seven positions.Industrial LLM evaluation therefore requires source-grounded, safety-aware diagnosis rather than aggregate accuracy. We release IndustryBench with all prompts, scoring scripts, and dataset documentation.