WirelessMathBench: A Mathematical Modeling Benchmark for LLMs in Wireless Communications

TL;DR

WirelessMathBench is a new benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs on complex mathematical modeling tasks specific to wireless communications, revealing current models' limitations in domain-specific reasoning.

Contribution

We introduce WirelessMathBench, a comprehensive benchmark with 587 questions from research papers to assess LLMs' capabilities in wireless communication mathematics.

Findings

LLMs perform poorly on complex equation reconstruction tasks.

DeepSeek-R1 achieves only 38.05% average accuracy on the benchmark.

Current LLMs struggle with domain-specific mathematical reasoning.

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved impressive results across a broad array of tasks, yet their capacity for complex, domain-specific mathematical reasoning-particularly in wireless communications-remains underexplored. In this work, we introduce WirelessMathBench, a novel benchmark specifically designed to evaluate LLMs on mathematical modeling challenges to wireless communications engineering. Our benchmark consists of 587 meticulously curated questions sourced from 40 state-of-the-art research papers, encompassing a diverse spectrum of tasks ranging from basic multiple-choice questions to complex equation completion tasks, including both partial and full completions, all of which rigorously adhere to physical and dimensional constraints. Through extensive experimentation with leading LLMs, we observe that while many models excel in basic recall tasks, their performance degrades significantly when reconstructing partially or fully obscured equations, exposing fundamental limitations in current LLMs. Even DeepSeek-R1, the best performer on our benchmark, achieves an average accuracy of only 38.05%, with a mere 7.83% success rate in full equation completion. By publicly releasing WirelessMathBench along with the evaluation toolkit, we aim to advance the development of more robust, domain-aware LLMs for wireless system analysis and broader engineering applications.