Adaptive Research Depth Scaling Based On Problem Complexity

via “difficulty-stratified problem categorization and filtering”

10K coding problems across 3 difficulty levels with test suites.

Unique: Explicitly stratifies problems into three difficulty tiers with substantial size per tier (3.6K, 5K, 1.4K), enabling fine-grained analysis of model performance degradation across skill levels rather than treating all problems as equal difficulty

vs others: Unlike HumanEval which lacks difficulty stratification, APPS enables researchers to measure whether models have genuine reasoning or are pattern-matching, by comparing performance across tiers