IdleSpec improves LLM agent accuracy by generating and aggregating speculative plans during idle time between tool calls and observations using complementary drafting strategies.
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Mle-bench: Evaluating machine learning agents on machine learning engineering
Mixed citation behavior. Most common role is background (67%).
53
Pith papers citing it
Background
67% of classified citations
abstract
We introduce MLE-bench, a benchmark for measuring how well AI agents perform at machine learning engineering. To this end, we curate 75 ML engineering-related competitions from Kaggle, creating a diverse set of challenging tasks that test real-world ML engineering skills such as training models, preparing datasets, and running experiments. We establish human baselines for each competition using Kaggle's publicly available leaderboards. We use open-source agent scaffolds to evaluate several frontier language models on our benchmark, finding that the best-performing setup--OpenAI's o1-preview with AIDE scaffolding--achieves at least the level of a Kaggle bronze medal in 16.9% of competitions. In addition to our main results, we investigate various forms of resource scaling for AI agents and the impact of contamination from pre-training. We open-source our benchmark code (github.com/openai/mle-bench/) to facilitate future research in understanding the ML engineering capabilities of AI agents.
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representative citing papers
Evolutionary coding agents achieve most benchmark gains through a small subset of edit types and by cycling previously deleted code lines rather than developing new algorithmic structures.
WildRoadBench provides a professionally annotated UAV corpus and dual-track protocol showing frontier VLMs and LLM agents achieve limited performance on wild aerial road-damage grounding under unified metrics.
DecisionBench supplies a fixed task suite, model pool, delegation interface, and multi-axis metrics to evaluate emergent delegation, showing similar quality across awareness conditions but 15-31 point headroom under perfect delegation.
WebGameBench is a new benchmark that evaluates coding agents on building browser-native games from frozen specifications, with runtime browser evaluation showing best agents reach 76.9% usable rate but only 20.2% excellent rate.
BioXArena benchmarks LLM agents on generating end-to-end ML pipelines for 76 multi-modal biomedical tasks, with MLEvolve plus Gemini-3.1-Pro scoring highest at 0.666.
SMCEvolve applies Sequential Monte Carlo sampling to LLM program search with adaptive resampling, mutation mixtures, and convergence control, delivering finite-sample complexity bounds and benchmark gains over prior systems.
FrontierSmith automates synthesis of open-ended coding problems from closed-ended seeds and shows measurable gains on two open-ended LLM coding benchmarks.
Collider-Bench is a new benchmark showing that current LLM agents cannot reliably reproduce LHC analyses at the level of a physicist-in-the-loop.
BenchJack audits 10 AI agent benchmarks, synthesizes exploits achieving near-perfect scores without task completion, surfaces 219 flaws, and reduces hackable-task ratios to under 10% on four benchmarks via iterative patching.
KompeteAI accelerates AutoML pipeline evaluation 6.9 times and beats prior systems by 3% on MLE-Bench through candidate merging, external RAG, and predictive early scoring.
Frontier models demonstrate in-context scheming by strategically deceiving in multiple agentic evaluations to achieve given goals.
Enforcing role separation in agent teams reveals that prompt-only setups hide coordination failures, with verifiers approving 49% of failing work and teams sometimes harming performance when solo agents already succeed.
AcademiClaw is a new benchmark of 80 student-sourced academic tasks where the best frontier AI agents achieve only a 55% pass rate.
LLMs predict outcomes of real scientific experiments at 14-26% accuracy, comparable to human experts, but lack calibration on prediction reliability while humans demonstrate strong calibration.
FrontierFinance benchmark shows human financial experts outperform state-of-the-art LLMs by achieving higher scores and more client-ready outputs on realistic long-horizon tasks.
SERL selectively reweights learning using task success and environment feedback to reach 90.0% success on ALFWorld and 80.1% on WebShop, outperforming RL and distillation baselines.
ResearchArena shows that agent-generated papers fail top-tier acceptance standards primarily due to fabricated results, underpowered experiments, and plan-execution mismatches that vary sharply by agent.
DiagEval applies trajectory-conditioned diagnostic probes to recover 45.6-62.1% of misattributed failures in GUI-agent software evaluation, raising accuracy from 69.9% to 78.3% on WebDevJudge-Unit and 65.0% to 81.6% on RealDevBench.
MLReplicate benchmark evaluates six autonomous systems on 45 manuscripts from ICML 2025 papers, finding that automated reviews accept flawed outputs with fabricated claims while human review exposes methodological failures, and that the cheapest system outperforms the most expensive by a wide margin
DataMaster deploys an AI agent to autonomously engineer data via tree search over external sources, shared candidate pools, and memory of past outcomes, yielding 32% higher medal rates on MLE-Bench Lite and a small GPQA gain over the base instruct model.
Gome reaches 35.1% any-medal rate on MLE-Bench by mapping reasoning to gradient-based updates, outperforming tree search once models are sufficiently capable.
xKG is a paper-centric knowledge base that extracts code and insights to improve LLM agent performance on AI research replication by 10.9% on PaperBench.
MachineLearningLM uses continued pretraining on SCM-synthesized ML tasks with random-forest distillation to give LLMs robust many-shot in-context learning on tabular classification, reaching random-forest accuracy levels while preserving general chat performance.
citing papers explorer
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IdleSpec: Exploiting Idle Time via Speculative Planning for LLM Agents
IdleSpec improves LLM agent accuracy by generating and aggregating speculative plans during idle time between tool calls and observations using complementary drafting strategies.
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What Do Evolutionary Coding Agents Evolve?
Evolutionary coding agents achieve most benchmark gains through a small subset of edit types and by cycling previously deleted code lines rather than developing new algorithmic structures.
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WildRoadBench: A Wild Aerial Road-Damage Grounding Benchmark for Vision-Language Models and Autonomous Agents
WildRoadBench provides a professionally annotated UAV corpus and dual-track protocol showing frontier VLMs and LLM agents achieve limited performance on wild aerial road-damage grounding under unified metrics.
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DecisionBench: A Benchmark for Emergent Delegation in Long-Horizon Agentic Workflows
DecisionBench supplies a fixed task suite, model pool, delegation interface, and multi-axis metrics to evaluate emergent delegation, showing similar quality across awareness conditions but 15-31 point headroom under perfect delegation.
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WebGameBench: Requirement-to-Application Evaluation for Coding Agents via Browser-Native Games
WebGameBench is a new benchmark that evaluates coding agents on building browser-native games from frozen specifications, with runtime browser evaluation showing best agents reach 76.9% usable rate but only 20.2% excellent rate.
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BioXArena: Benchmarking LLM Agents on Multi-Modal Biomedical Machine Learning Tasks
BioXArena benchmarks LLM agents on generating end-to-end ML pipelines for 76 multi-modal biomedical tasks, with MLEvolve plus Gemini-3.1-Pro scoring highest at 0.666.
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SMCEvolve: Principled Scientific Discovery via Sequential Monte Carlo Evolution
SMCEvolve applies Sequential Monte Carlo sampling to LLM program search with adaptive resampling, mutation mixtures, and convergence control, delivering finite-sample complexity bounds and benchmark gains over prior systems.
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FrontierSmith: Synthesizing Open-Ended Coding Problems at Scale
FrontierSmith automates synthesis of open-ended coding problems from closed-ended seeds and shows measurable gains on two open-ended LLM coding benchmarks.
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Collider-Bench: Benchmarking AI Agents with Particle Physics Analysis Reproduction
Collider-Bench is a new benchmark showing that current LLM agents cannot reliably reproduce LHC analyses at the level of a physicist-in-the-loop.
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Do Androids Dream of Breaking the Game? Systematically Auditing AI Agent Benchmarks with BenchJack
BenchJack audits 10 AI agent benchmarks, synthesizes exploits achieving near-perfect scores without task completion, surfaces 219 flaws, and reduces hackable-task ratios to under 10% on four benchmarks via iterative patching.
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KompeteAI: Accelerated Autonomous Multi-Agent System for End-to-End Pipeline Generation for Machine Learning Problems
KompeteAI accelerates AutoML pipeline evaluation 6.9 times and beats prior systems by 3% on MLE-Bench through candidate merging, external RAG, and predictive early scoring.
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Frontier Models are Capable of In-context Scheming
Frontier models demonstrate in-context scheming by strategically deceiving in multiple agentic evaluations to achieve given goals.
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TeamBench: Evaluating Agent Coordination under Enforced Role Separation
Enforcing role separation in agent teams reveals that prompt-only setups hide coordination failures, with verifiers approving 49% of failing work and teams sometimes harming performance when solo agents already succeed.
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AcademiClaw: When Students Set Challenges for AI Agents
AcademiClaw is a new benchmark of 80 student-sourced academic tasks where the best frontier AI agents achieve only a 55% pass rate.
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SciPredict: Can LLMs Predict the Outcomes of Scientific Experiments in Natural Sciences?
LLMs predict outcomes of real scientific experiments at 14-26% accuracy, comparable to human experts, but lack calibration on prediction reliability while humans demonstrate strong calibration.
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FrontierFinance: A Long-Horizon Computer-Use Benchmark of Real-World Financial Tasks
FrontierFinance benchmark shows human financial experts outperform state-of-the-art LLMs by achieving higher scores and more client-ready outputs on realistic long-horizon tasks.
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What and When to Distill: Selective Hindsight Distillation for Multi-Turn Agents
SERL selectively reweights learning using task success and environment feedback to reach 90.0% success on ALFWorld and 80.1% on WebShop, outperforming RL and distillation baselines.
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How Far Are We From True Auto-Research?
ResearchArena shows that agent-generated papers fail top-tier acceptance standards primarily due to fabricated results, underpowered experiments, and plan-execution mismatches that vary sharply by agent.
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DiagEval: Trajectory-Conditioned Diagnosis for Reliable Software Evaluation with GUI Agents
DiagEval applies trajectory-conditioned diagnostic probes to recover 45.6-62.1% of misattributed failures in GUI-agent software evaluation, raising accuracy from 69.9% to 78.3% on WebDevJudge-Unit and 65.0% to 81.6% on RealDevBench.
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MLReplicate: Benchmarking Autonomous Research Systems for Machine Learning Reproducibility
MLReplicate benchmark evaluates six autonomous systems on 45 manuscripts from ICML 2025 papers, finding that automated reviews accept flawed outputs with fabricated claims while human review exposes methodological failures, and that the cheapest system outperforms the most expensive by a wide margin
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DataMaster: Data-Centric Autonomous AI Research
DataMaster deploys an AI agent to autonomously engineer data via tree search over external sources, shared candidate pools, and memory of past outcomes, yielding 32% higher medal rates on MLE-Bench Lite and a small GPQA gain over the base instruct model.
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Reasoning as Gradient: Scaling MLE Agents Beyond Tree Search
Gome reaches 35.1% any-medal rate on MLE-Bench by mapping reasoning to gradient-based updates, outperforming tree search once models are sufficiently capable.
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What Makes AI Research Replicable? Executable Knowledge Graphs as Scientific Knowledge Representations
xKG is a paper-centric knowledge base that extracts code and insights to improve LLM agent performance on AI research replication by 10.9% on PaperBench.
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MachineLearningLM: Scaling Many-shot In-context Learning via Continued Pretraining
MachineLearningLM uses continued pretraining on SCM-synthesized ML tasks with random-forest distillation to give LLMs robust many-shot in-context learning on tabular classification, reaching random-forest accuracy levels while preserving general chat performance.
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RExBench: Can coding agents autonomously implement AI research extensions?
RExBench is a new benchmark showing that LLM coding agents fail to autonomously implement most realistic research extensions to prior AI papers.
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DeepResearch Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Deep Research Agents
DeepResearch Bench supplies 100 expert-crafted PhD-level tasks and two human-aligned evaluation frameworks to measure deep research agents on report quality and citation accuracy.
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VS-Bench: Evaluating VLMs for Strategic Abilities in Multi-Agent Environments
VS-Bench is a new benchmark of ten visual multi-agent environments that measures VLMs on element recognition, next-action prediction, and normalized episode return, showing strong perception but large gaps in reasoning and decision-making with the best model at 46.6% prediction accuracy and 31.4% of
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OPT-BENCH: Evaluating the Iterative Self-Optimization of LLM Agents in Large-Scale Search Spaces
OPT-BENCH and OPT-Agent evaluate LLM self-optimization in large search spaces, showing stronger models improve via feedback but stay constrained by base capacity and below human performance.
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Odysseus: Scaling VLMs to 100+ Turn Decision-Making in Games via Reinforcement Learning
Odysseus adapts PPO with a turn-level critic and leverages pretrained VLM action priors to train agents achieving at least 3x average game progress over frontier models in long-horizon Super Mario Land.
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On Benchmark Hacking in ML Contests: Modeling, Insights and Design
In a game-theoretic model of ML contests, low-type contestants engage in benchmark hacking while high-types focus on creative effort, with more skewed rewards improving overall outcomes.
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Evaluation-driven Scaling for Scientific Discovery
SimpleTES scales test-time evaluation in LLMs to discover state-of-the-art solutions on 21 scientific problems across six domains, outperforming frontier models and optimization pipelines with examples like 2x faster LASSO and new Erdos constructions.
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TREX: Automating LLM Fine-tuning via Agent-Driven Tree-based Exploration
TREX automates the LLM training lifecycle via collaborative agents and tree-based exploration, delivering consistent performance gains across 10 real-world fine-tuning tasks in FT-Bench.
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Frontier-Eng: Benchmarking Self-Evolving Agents on Real-World Engineering Tasks with Generative Optimization
Frontier-Eng is a new benchmark for generative optimization in engineering where agents iteratively improve designs under fixed interaction budgets using executable verifiers, with top models like GPT 5.4 showing limited success.
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Pioneer Agent: Continual Improvement of Small Language Models in Production
Pioneer Agent automates the full lifecycle of adapting and continually improving small language models via diagnosis-driven data synthesis and regression-constrained retraining, delivering gains of 1.6-83.8 points on benchmarks and large lifts in production-style tasks.
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In-Place Test-Time Training
In-Place TTT adapts LLM MLP projection matrices at test time with a next-token-aligned objective and chunk-wise updates, enabling better long-context performance as a drop-in enhancement.
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Multilingual Prompt Localization for Agent-as-a-Judge: Language and Backbone Sensitivity in Requirement-Level Evaluation
Localizing judge prompts to five languages shows that LLM backbones interact with language in agent-as-a-judge evaluations, inverting rankings and revealing no universal best model with low inter-judge agreement.
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From Pixels to Digital Agents: An Empirical Study on the Taxonomy and Technological Trends of Reinforcement Learning Environments
An empirical literature analysis reveals a bifurcation in RL environments into Semantic Prior (LLM-dominated) and Domain-Specific Generalization ecosystems with distinct cognitive fingerprints.
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AceGRPO: Adaptive Curriculum Enhanced Group Relative Policy Optimization for Autonomous Machine Learning Engineering
AceGRPO trains 30B-parameter LLM agents to achieve 100% valid submissions and competitive performance on MLE-Bench-Lite through evolving data buffers and adaptive task sampling.
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End-to-end PDDL Planning with Hardcoded and Dynamic Agents
An end-to-end LLM framework refines natural language into valid PDDL domains and problems via hardcoded and dynamic agents, generates plans with standard engines, and returns readable output.
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PACEvolve++: Improving Test-time Learning for Evolutionary Search Agents
PACEvolve++ uses a phase-adaptive reinforcement learning advisor to decouple hypothesis selection from execution in LLM-driven evolutionary search, delivering faster convergence than prior frameworks on load balancing, recommendation, and protein tasks.
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EvoMaster: A Foundational Evolving Agent Framework for Agentic Science at Scale
EvoMaster is a self-evolving agent framework that achieves state-of-the-art results on scientific benchmarks by enabling iterative hypothesis refinement and knowledge accumulation across domains.
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Spatial Atlas: Compute-Grounded Reasoning for Spatial-Aware Research Agent Benchmarks
Spatial Atlas implements compute-grounded reasoning via a structured scene graph engine and deterministic computations to deliver competitive accuracy on spatial QA and Kaggle ML benchmarks while preserving interpretability.
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Towards Reasoning Era: A Survey of Long Chain-of-Thought for Reasoning Large Language Models
The paper unifies perspectives on Long CoT in reasoning LLMs by introducing a taxonomy, detailing characteristics of deep reasoning and reflection, and discussing emergence phenomena and future directions.
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Humanity's Last Exam
Humanity's Last Exam is a new 2,500-question benchmark at the frontier of human knowledge where state-of-the-art LLMs show low accuracy.
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A Survey of Self-Evolving Agents: What, When, How, and Where to Evolve on the Path to Artificial Super Intelligence
The paper delivers the first systematic review of self-evolving agents, structured around what components evolve, when adaptation occurs, and how it is implemented.
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From LLM Reasoning to Autonomous AI Agents: A Comprehensive Review
A survey consolidating benchmarks, agent frameworks, real-world applications, and protocols for LLM-based autonomous agents into a proposed taxonomy with recommendations for future research.
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A Survey of Reinforcement Learning for Large Reasoning Models
A survey compiling RL methods, challenges, data resources, and applications for enhancing reasoning in large language models and large reasoning models since DeepSeek-R1.
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Large Language Model Agent: A Survey on Methodology, Applications and Challenges
A survey that deconstructs LLM agent systems via a methodology-centered taxonomy linking design principles to emergent behaviors, applications, and challenges.
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Europe and the Geopolitics of AGI: The Need for a Preparedness Plan
AGI may arrive by 2030-2040 and reshape global power balances, requiring Europe to close gaps in compute, talent retention, industrial adoption, and unified policy responses through a coordinated preparedness agenda.
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