CL-bench Life
Models solve 405 tasks that require learning from messy real-life context such as group chats. A model judge checks rubrics to give a solve rate.
The best model solved 19.3 percent of tasks at release.
In the authors’ words
Today's AI assistants such as OpenClaw are designed to handle context effectively, making context learning an increasingly important capability for models. As these systems move beyond professional settings into everyday life, the nature of the contexts they must handle also shifts. Real-life contexts are often messy, fragmented, and deeply tied to personal and social experience, such as multi-party conversations, personal archives, and behavioral traces. Yet it remains unclear whether current frontier language models can reliably learn from such contexts and solve tasks grounded in them. To this end, we introduce CL-bench Life, a fully human-curated benchmark comprising 405 context-task pairs and 5,348 verification rubrics, covering common real-life scenarios. Solving tasks in CL-bench Life requires models to reason over complex, messy real-life contexts, calling for strong real-life context learning abilities that go far beyond those evaluated in existing benchmarks. We evaluate ten frontier LMs and find that real-life context learning remains highly challenging: even the best-performing model achieves only 19.3% task solving rate, while the average performance across models is only 13.8%. Models still struggle to reason over contexts such as messy group chat histories and fragmented behavioral records from everyday life. CL-bench Life provides a crucial testbed for advancing real-life context learning, and progress on it can enable more intelligent and reliable AI assistants in everyday life.
- Level
- Everyday Most adults, without training
- Scored
- Graded by a model A language model scores each response, usually against a rubric.
- Answers
- Open-ended Free-form text, documents, designs or media judged as a whole.
GPT-5.5 leads with 22.2% among models released by Apr 2026
Best score per model from the benchmark's own leaderboard, read on 2 Nov 2026. Where a model ran with several settings or harnesses, we keep its best. Every run is in the next chart.
The newest model with a score here came out in Apr 2026, and nobody has tested a newer one. Among the 20 highest-ranked models on the capability index, these have no score yet:
- GPT-6 Astra
- Claude Opus 5.5
- GPT-6.1 Terra
- GPT-6.1 Sol
- and 15 more
- 22.2 GPT-5.5
- 21.7 GPT-5.4
- 17.3 GPT-5.1
- 17.0 Claude Opus 4.6
- 16.9
Gemini 3.1 Pro
- 15.7
Tencent Hy3 preview
- 15.5
Seed2.0 Pro
- 13.5
DeepSeek-V4-Pro
- 13.2 Kimi K2.5
- 12.4
Qwen 3.5 Plus (hosted 397B-A17B)
- 11.9 Grok 4.20
- 10.9 GLM-4.7
- 9.50
DeepSeek-V3.2
- 8.40
Tencent HY 2.0 Think
- 6.90 MiMo-V2-Pro
- 6.30
MiniMax-M2.5
- 1 GPT-5.5 high 22.2%
- 2 GPT-5.4 xhigh 21.7%
- 3 GPT-5.1 high 17.3%
- 4 Claude Opus 4.6 high 17%
- 5
Gemini 3.1 Pro high 16.9%
- 6
Tencent Hy3 preview high 15.7%
- 7
Seed2.0 Pro high 15.5%
- 8
DeepSeek-V4-Pro high 13.5%
- 9 Kimi K2.5 high 13.2%
- 10
Qwen 3.5 Plus (hosted 397B-A17B) high 12.4%
- 11 Grok 4.20 high 11.9%
- 12 GLM-4.7 high 10.9%
- 13
DeepSeek-V3.2 thinking 9.50%
- 14
Tencent HY 2.0 Think 8.40%
- 15 MiMo-V2-Pro high 6.90%
- 16
MiniMax-M2.5 thinking 6.30%
| # | Model | Score | Setting | Date | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | GPT-5.5 | 22.2% | high | Apr 2026 | Official leaderboard |
| 2 | GPT-5.4 | 21.7% | xhigh | Mar 2026 | Official leaderboard |
| 3 | GPT-5.1 | 17.3% | high | Nov 2025 | Official leaderboard |
| 4 | Claude Opus 4.6 | 17% | high | Feb 2026 | Official leaderboard |
| 5 | | 16.9% | high | Feb 2026 | Official leaderboard |
| 6 | | 15.7% | high | Apr 2026 | Official leaderboard |
| 7 | | 15.5% | high | Feb 2026 | Official leaderboard |
| 8 | | 13.5% | high | Apr 2026 | Official leaderboard |
| 9 | Kimi K2.5 | 13.2% | high | Jan 2026 | Official leaderboard |
| 10 | | 12.4% | high | Feb 2026 | Official leaderboard |
| 11 | Grok 4.20 | 11.9% | high | Feb 2026 | Official leaderboard |
| 12 | GLM-4.7 | 10.9% | high | Dec 2025 | Official leaderboard |
| 13 | | 9.50% | thinking | Dec 2025 | Official leaderboard |
| 14 | | 8.40% | Dec 2025 | Official leaderboard | |
| 15 | MiMo-V2-Pro | 6.90% | high | Mar 2026 | Official leaderboard |
| 16 | | 6.30% | thinking | Feb 2026 | Official leaderboard |
Epoch AI has scores for 14 models. Labs report scores for 2 models in their cards. We plot every source in the charts below.
Scores at each effort level
Models the leaderboard ran at two or more effort levels. We don’t have enough cost data here to say what the extra effort costs.
| Model | Effort | Harness | Score | Cost per task | Output tokens |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GPT-5.5 | high | 22.2% | |||
| GPT-5.4 | xhigh | 21.7% | |||
| GPT-5.4 | high | 19.3% | |||
| GPT-5.1 | high | 17.3% | |||
| Claude Opus 4.6 | high | 17% | |||
| | high | 16.9% | |||
| | 16% | ||||
| | high | 15.7% | |||
| | high | 15.5% | |||
| GPT-5.4 | 13.8% | ||||
| Claude Opus 4.6 | 13.6% | ||||
| | high | 13.5% | |||
| Kimi K2.5 | high | 13.2% | |||
| | low | 12.8% | |||
| | high | 12.4% | |||
| | low | 12.1% | |||
| Grok 4.20 | high | 11.9% | |||
| | medium | 11.4% | |||
| GLM-4.7 | high | 10.9% | |||
| Kimi K2.5 | 9.60% | ||||
| | thinking | 9.50% | |||
| | non-thinking | 9.40% | |||
| Grok 4.20 | 8.60% | ||||
| | 8.40% | ||||
| | 8.40% | ||||
| | 8.10% | ||||
| | 7.40% | ||||
| MiMo-V2-Pro | high | 6.90% | |||
| | thinking | 6.30% |
2 models have held number one since its release in Apr 2026
Lab claims count from the day the card came out, independent runs from the model’s release. We draw one row each for the benchmark’s own leaderboard and Epoch AI’s runs.
Scores over time
All the scores we have, one dot each, so a model tested at several settings appears more than once.
Labs headline it less often now, last in Jul 2026
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2 Jul 2026 | 17 | CL-bench life | |
| 23 Apr 2026 | 15.7 | CL-bench Life |
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. Beam 1.0 66.9%
- 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 5 100%
- 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.
K-EXAONE 2.0 94.4%
- 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%
- AA-LCR 1.1 In use 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.
Step 5 Preview 88.3%