Beyond Isolated Dots: Benchmarking Structured Table Construction as Deep Knowledge Extraction

arXiv:2507.16271v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly expected to extract and synthesize structured information from complex real-world documents, yet they typically produce unstructured, hard-to-verify paragraph-style outputs. We introduce AOE (Arranged and Organized Extraction), a bilingual benchmark that evaluates LLMs' ability to distill long-form, multi-document inputs (64k to 1.8M tokens) into structured tables. AOE comprises 12 tasks across four domains (academic, financial, legal, and medical), each grounded in genuine analytical needs, with schema guidance provided to isolate extraction quality from formatting variance. We evaluate 12 frontier LLMs (both open-weight and proprietary) under four generation settings of increasing autonomy: direct full-document input, RAG-based retrieval, offline document-browsing agent, and online web-search agent. Even the best-performing model achieves only 42.7% Cell F1, and retrieval-augmented approaches often degrade rather than improve performance, revealing that structured extraction from long contexts remains a fundamental challenge - an "Area of Effect" (AOE) that impacts all tested systems.