2026

Counterfactual reasoning requires models to reason beyond the observed world and explain how altered conditions propagate through downstream consequences. Existing benchmarks largely target bounded settings with fixed variables or single gold outcomes, overlooking open-domain scenarios requiring causal-process evaluation. To this end, we present WhatIfBench, a diagnostic benchmark for open-domain, open-form, long-horizon counterfactual causal reasoning, containing 220 what-if questions across STEM, HSS, and Hybrid scenarios. To evaluate free-form responses, we further propose PRISM, which first converts each natural-language explanation into a Response-Derived Semantic Causal Graph of events, states, and mechanisms. On top of this graph, PRISM then jointly applies a Process Metric assessing graph-level causal validity and a Rubric Metric assessing answer-level explanatory adequacy. Evaluating six frontier LLMs with this framework, we find that WhatIfBench remains far from saturated: even the strongest model reaches only a 64.62% final score. Further analysis reveals persistent causal gaps, premise drift, and topology fragmentation, suggesting that fluent counterfactual narratives often mask fragile causal processes. The benchmark, code, and evaluation scripts are available at https://github.com/zju-gt/WhatIfBench.
Multimodal large language models show significant potential in mathematical reasoning, yet they remain constrained by a scarcity of high-quality training data for visually grounded problems. Existing approaches commonly suffer from narrow coverage, image-text inconsistency, and heavy imitation of seed problems. To address these limitations, this paper proposes AgSynth, a multi-agent collaborative reverse synthesis framework. It first constructs solution logic programmatically and renders the corresponding images, then generates problem statements backward from the visual facts, thereby embedding answer correctness and image-text consistency directly into the generation pipeline. Meanwhile, AgSynth distills the core competencies tested in seed problems and performs divergent reconstruction, enabling synthesized problems to be substantially novel in both structure and visual presentation. Based on this framework, we construct the AgSynth-10K dataset, comprising 10,477 multimodal mathematical reasoning problems that have undergone two-tier quality control, spanning four major domains: geometry, algebra, combinatorics, and number theory. Experiments demonstrate that reinforcement learning training on AgSynth-10K significantly improves model performance on reasoning-intensive benchmarks (WeMath +7.42, LogicVista+9.15), validating the effectiveness of this traceable synthesis paradigm. The framework is publicly available at https://github.com/Yaxuan7690/AgSynth.