MechBench: A Domain-Specific LLM Benchmark for Parallel Mechanisms

Parallel mechanisms pose distinctive challenges to large language models (LLMs), as valid reasoning depends jointly on mechanism topology, loop closure, geometry, joint types, and modeling assumptions. Yet existing LLM benchmarks provide little systematic coverage of such domain-specific knowledge, constraint-sensitive analysis, and constructive design. To fill this gap, we introduce MECHBENCH, a 2,541-question benchmark for evaluating LLMs in parallel mechanisms across professional knowledge, mechanism analysis, and design. MECHBENCH contains standard and challenge tiers spanning six capability categories and nine executable analysis and design tasks. It is constructed through MECHFORGE, a domain-grounded framework that combines expert-organized knowledge, LLM-assisted question generation, programmatic instance generation, two-stage expert review, and task-aware scoring with exact matching, rubric-based evaluation, and program verification. We further develop MECHGPT as a diagnostic domain-adapted model. Experiments show that strong knowledge performance does not directly translate into executable mechanism reasoning: leading closed-service models achieve over 95 on the standard tier but only 47–60 on the challenge tier, while domain adaptation substantially improves MechGPT over its Qwen3-8B baselines but leaves a large gap in constrained analysis and design. These results establish MECHBENCH as a systematic testbed for measuring domain-specific LLM capabilities in mechanism science.