MathNet: a Global Multimodal Benchmark for Mathematical Reasoning and Retrieval

TL;DR

MathNet is a comprehensive, multilingual dataset and benchmark for mathematical reasoning and retrieval, covering diverse Olympiad problems and challenging state-of-the-art models across multiple tasks.

Contribution

It introduces the largest high-quality Olympiad-level math dataset and the first benchmark for mathematical problem retrieval, supporting multiple tasks and multilingual data.

Findings

State-of-the-art models still struggle with problem solving accuracy.

Embedding models have difficulty retrieving equivalent problems.

Retrieval-augmented generation benefits significantly from high-quality retrieval.

Abstract

Mathematical problem solving remains a challenging test of reasoning for large language and multimodal models, yet existing benchmarks are limited in size, language coverage, and task diversity. We introduce MathNet, a high-quality, large-scale, multimodal, and multilingual dataset of Olympiad-level math problems together with a benchmark for evaluating mathematical reasoning in generative models and mathematical retrieval in embedding-based systems. MathNet spans 47 countries, 17 languages, and two decades of competitions, comprising 30,676 expert-authored problems with solutions across diverse domains. In addition to the core dataset, we construct a retrieval benchmark consisting of mathematically equivalent and structurally similar problem pairs curated by human experts. MathNet supports three tasks: (i) Problem Solving, (ii) Math-Aware Retrieval, and (iii) Retrieval-Augmented Problem Solving. Experimental results show that even state-of-the-art reasoning models (78.4% for Gemini-3.1-Pro and 69.3% for GPT-5) remain challenged, while embedding models struggle to retrieve equivalent problems. We further show that retrieval-augmented generation performance is highly sensitive to retrieval quality; for example, DeepSeek-V3.2-Speciale achieves gains of up to 12%, obtaining the highest scores on the benchmark. MathNet provides the largest high-quality Olympiad dataset together with the first benchmark for evaluating mathematical problem retrieval, and we publicly release both the dataset and benchmark at https://mathnet.mit.edu.