XYBench: Helping with the problem behind the question

📄 Paper | 🤗 Data | 💻 Code

Truly useful AI assistants need to be able to help users who ask misguided questions—not just users who ask the right question with the right amount of detail. We’re releasing XYBench, a benchmark of 8K+ questions that tests how AI assistants respond to requests based on misconceptions, such as asking how to thicken frosting that keeps sliding off cupcakes when the real problem is that the cupcakes are still too warm to frost. XYBench won the Best Resource Paper Award at EMNLP 2026.

A mismatch between the approach someone asks about and the goal they want to achieve is known as the XY problem: a person wants to accomplish X, assumes a particular approach Y will work, and asks for help with Y. In the cupcake example, the person is so committed to making the frosting stick that they fail to consider the warmth of the cupcake as the true problem to be addressed.

Developed with researchers at Carnegie Mellon, NVIDIA, and Johns Hopkins, XYBench exposes a critical gap in LLMs' ability to troubleshoot problems: recognizing when a user's request is based on an implicit misconception and appropriately redirecting them toward a solution that addresses their actual goal. Drawing on 8,115 real-world questions spanning programming and everyday activities such as cooking and home repair, we introduce a benchmark that measures whether models identify these misconceptions and are able to prioritize effective solutions in their responses.

The models we evaluated on XYBench – Claude Sonnet 4.6, GPT-5, Gemini 3.1 Pro, Qwen3.5-9B, and DeepSeek-V4 Pro – often suggested a solution to the user’s problem but kept their answers focused on the original, mistaken approach. Unlike human reference answers, all five models were less likely to steer users away from that approach and toward a solution suited to their goal.