BrainBench: Exposing the Commonsense Reasoning Gap in Large Language Models

Yuzhe Tang

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arXiv · 2603.14761

BrainBench: Exposing the Commonsense Reasoning Gap in Large Language Models

Yuzhe Tang

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Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) achieve impressive scores on standard benchmarks yet routinely fail questions that any human would answer correctly in seconds. We introduce BrainBench, a benchmark of 100 brainteaser questions spanning 20 carefully designed categories, each targeting a specific commonsense reasoning failure mode in LLMs. Categories range from implicit physical constraints ("Should I walk or drive my rental car to the return lot?") to semantic scope tricks and default assumption hijacks. We evaluate eight frontier models -- four from the Claude family and four from the GPT family -- using a zero-shot protocol with 10 independent runs per question. The best model, Claude Opus 4.6 with extended thinking, achieves only 80.3% accuracy; the worst, GPT-4o, scores 39.7%. Even top-performing models exhibit a 6-16 percentage-point gap between accuracy and consistency, revealing stochastic reasoning. Cross-lingual evaluation in Chinese shows most models degrade by 2-8 percentage points, confirming that these failures reflect reasoning deficits rather than language-specific artifacts. BrainBench provides a fine-grained diagnostic tool for identifying where and why LLMs substitute surface heuristics for genuine commonsense reasoning.

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Yuzhe Tang. 2026-03-16. BrainBench: Exposing the Commonsense Reasoning Gap in Large Language Models. https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.14761

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