AA-LCR 1.1
Step 5 Preview 88.3% leads since September 2026 Models answer 100 questions that need reasoning across sets of real documents of about 100K tokens. An LLM equality checker with a fixed system prompt compares each answer with the key.
Version 1.1 corrects 16 answer keys and adds a judge system prompt. Questions and documents are unchanged, but the maker says 1.0 and 1.1 scores are not directly comparable.
- Made by
- Artificial Analysis
- Released
- September 2026
- Kind
- Reasoning over long documents
- Level
- University
- Scored
- Checked automatically
- Answers
- Short answer
- Tasks
- All public
- Last in a launch post
- November 2026
- Last model added
- November 2026
Step 5 Preview leads with 88.3%
Best score per model as labs report them in their own cards. Labs pick their own settings, so these compare less cleanly than independent runs.
- 1 Step 5 Preview 88.3%
- 2
Solar Mini 4 83.3% - 3
Inkling 2 Small 83.3% - 4 Mercury 3 77.7%
- 5
Nemotron 3.5 Super VL 68.6% - 6
Spark-X2.6-4B 67.3%
Source: Labs’ model cards
| # | Model | Score | Setting | Date | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Step 5 Preview | 88.3% | Sep 2026 | Lab model card | |
| 2 | Solar Mini 4 | 83.3% | Oct 2026 | Lab model card | |
| 3 | Inkling 2 Small | 83.3% | Nov 2026 | Lab model card | |
| 4 | Mercury 3 | 77.7% | Oct 2026 | Lab model card | |
| 5 | Nemotron 3.5 Super VL | 68.6% | Oct 2026 | Lab model card | |
| 6 | Spark-X2.6-4B | 67.3% | Oct 2026 | Lab model card |
Number one over time
Lab claims count from the day the card came out, independent runs from the model’s release.
Source: Labs’ model cards
StepFun’s own number for Step 5 Preview passed 85% in September 2026
All the scores we have, one dot each, so a model tested at several settings appears more than once.
Source: Labs’ model cards
6 labs put it in a launch post in the last six months
Launch posts from every lab that has listed it, one tick per post. Tall colored ticks include it, and short gray ones leave it out.
| Date | Launch post | Score | As the post writes it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nov 5, 2026 | Inkling 2 Small | 83.3 | AA-LCR v1.1 |
| Oct 22, 2026 | Spark-X2.6-4B | 67.3 | AA-LCRv1.1 |
| Oct 19, 2026 | Mercury 3 | 77.7 | AA-LCR v1.1 |
| Oct 15, 2026 | Nemotron 3.5 Super VL | 68.6 | AA-LCR v1.1 |
| Oct 1, 2026 | Solar Mini 4 | 83.3 | AA-LCR (Artificial Analysis score quoted by Upstage) |
| Sep 20, 2026 | Step 5 Preview | 88.3 | AA-LCR v1.1 |
One system card reports it
Besides launch posts, we read the system cards, model cards and technical reports labs publish with a release. They report far more, including safety and frontier-risk tests.
| Date | Document | Score | As the document writes it | Section |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 15, 2026 | Nemotron 3.5 Super VL technical report | 68.6 | AA-LCR v1.1, mean of 16 (Table 10) | Capabilities |
Versions
We switch the top row to each new version when it comes out. Open it for one row per version. An old version stays in play while people still test it, so whoever first takes it past 85% gets credit for closing it out.
Source: Labs’ model cards
More in Long context
- MRCR v2 In use Multi-round coreference: retrieve the n-th of several similar requests hidden in a long synthetic conversation, up to 1M tokens.
Muse Spark 1.3 98.5% - LongBench v2 In use 503 multiple-choice questions over 8K-2M-word contexts (QA, dialogue, code repos, structured data). Accuracy. Inkling 2 Small 70.6%
- GraphWalks In use A graph is given as an edge list in long context. The model answers BFS or parent queries, scored by F1. Claude Fable 5 99.96%
- OpenAI MRCR v2 In use Models read a long synthetic chat that hides 2, 4 or 8 identical writing requests and must reproduce the response to the i-th one. Scored by mean string match ratio per context bin.
Gemini 3.7 Flash 89% - CL-bench In use Model must learn new knowledge from a supplied long context (rules, procedures, data) and solve tasks. Strict LLM-verified rubrics. GPT-5.4 27.9%
- LOCA-Bench In use Agentic tasks whose environment state is scaled to grow context length while task semantics stay fixed. Success rate versus context length. GPT-5.2 21.3%