AARRI-Bench evaluates frontier LLMs and agents on granular research-intern-level tasks
Researchers introduce AARR (Act As a Real Researcher), a new benchmark series targeting whether AI agents can emulate the professionalism, thoroughness, and nuanced judgment of human researchers in granular research scenarios—not just macro-level task execution. The first benchmark, AARRI-Bench, tests frontier models and agentic harnesses, finding that even the best configuration (Mini-SWE-Agent with Claude Opus 4.7) achieves only 68.3% success, frequently missing subtle but critical details obvious to human researchers. The work argues that closing the gap requires deeper modeling of research behavior rather than more complex scaffolding.
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Benchmark Agent: Autonomous system for end-to-end benchmark construction
Researchers introduce Benchmark Agent, a fully autonomous agentic system that orchestrates the complete benchmark construction pipeline — from query analysis and subtask design to data annotation and quality control. The system was used to produce 15 benchmarks spanning text understanding, multimodal understanding, and domain-specific reasoning, with evaluation via human judges, LLM-as-a-judge, and consistency checks. The work addresses two persistent problems in the field: the labor intensity of benchmark creation and rapid performance saturation after release. Code and a demo will be publicly released.
Automated Benchmark Auditing for AI Agents and Large Language Models (ABA)
The paper introduces Auto Benchmark Audit (ABA), an agentic framework that systematically audits AI benchmark tasks for issues such as ambiguous specifications, environment conflicts, and incorrect ground truths. Applied to 168 benchmarks across nine domains including NeurIPS publications, ABA identifies critical issues in over 25.7% of evaluated tasks. The authors demonstrate that filtering out flawed tasks materially shifts model rankings and improves average performance on SWE-bench Verified and Terminal-Bench 2 by 9.9% and 9.6% respectively, indicating that current benchmark scores are significantly distorted by task quality problems. The agentic tool and annotations are released publicly.
MLE-bench: Evaluating Machine Learning Agents on Machine Learning Engineering
OpenAI introduces MLE-bench, a benchmark designed to measure AI agent performance on machine learning engineering tasks. The benchmark draws from Kaggle competitions to evaluate agents on realistic ML engineering workflows. Initial results show that current agents, including those powered by o1-preview, achieve competitive performance on a subset of tasks but fall well short of top human competitors. The benchmark is intended to track progress in agentic ML capabilities over time.
PaperBench: OpenAI Benchmark for Evaluating AI Agents on Research Replication
OpenAI introduces PaperBench, a benchmark designed to evaluate AI agents' ability to replicate state-of-the-art AI research papers end-to-end. The benchmark targets a high-complexity capability: reproducing experimental results from frontier AI research, which requires code generation, experimental design, and scientific reasoning. This positions PaperBench as a tool for tracking progress toward autonomous AI research agents.
T1-Bench: Multi-scenario agent benchmark across 25 real-world domains
T1-Bench is a new benchmark for evaluating agentic LLM systems in realistic customer-facing, multi-domain environments, covering 25 domains of varying difficulty with interleaved multi-turn scenarios. The authors evaluate 12 proprietary and open-weight models and combine automatic evaluation with human judgments. The benchmark targets gaps in existing agent evals around task complexity, domain diversity, and compositional reasoning across multi-step interactions.
AgentBeats: Standardized Agent Evaluation via A2A and MCP Protocols
A new arXiv preprint proposes Agentified Agent Assessment (AAA), a framework where evaluation is performed by judge agents interacting through standardized protocols—A2A for task management and MCP for tool access—rather than bespoke benchmark harnesses. The authors introduce AgentBeats as a concrete implementation, validated through a five-month open competition with 298 judge agents and 467 subject agents across 12 categories, plus a coding-agent case study. The work addresses fragmentation in agent evaluation by decoupling assessment logic from agent implementation, enabling reproducible and interoperable benchmarking.
AutoLab benchmark evaluates frontier models on ultra long-horizon iterative research and engineering tasks
AutoLab is a new benchmark of 36 expert-curated tasks across system optimization, puzzle-solving, model development, and CUDA kernel optimization, designed to test agents on sustained closed-loop improvement under wall-clock budgets rather than single-turn or short-horizon settings. Evaluation of 17 frontier models finds that persistence in iterative benchmarking and feedback incorporation — not initial attempt quality — is the dominant success predictor. Claude Opus 4.6 stands out as the strongest performer, while most models including proprietary ones either terminate early or exhaust budgets with minimal progress. The benchmark, harness, and task artifacts are open-sourced.
AssetOpsBench: Bridging the Gap Between AI Agent Benchmarks and Industrial Reality
IBM Research introduces AssetOpsBench, a benchmark designed to evaluate AI agents on industrial asset operations tasks, hosted on Hugging Face. The benchmark targets the gap between existing general-purpose agent benchmarks and real-world industrial deployment scenarios. It provides a playground environment for testing agent capabilities in enterprise/industrial contexts.