DSAEval: Evaluating Data Science Agents on a Wide Range of Real-World Data Science Problems

Real-world data science involves long-horizon workflows that span data wrangling, exploration, modeling, visualization, and validation, and require coordinated use of tools such as notebooks, IDEs, terminals, browsers, and databases within real operating environments. Yet existing benchmarks lack real-computer interaction and do not evaluate whether agents can execute complete end-to-end data-science workflows in realistic computing environments, failing to capture the multi-stage, multi-tool nature of data-science practice. We introduce DSAgentBench, the first benchmark to evaluate whether agents can automate full data-science workflows inside real computer environments. DSAgentBench contains 275 diverse tasks covering the entire data-science life-cycle, reflecting the complexity and tool coordination required in practice. Each task requires grounding decisions in intermediate outputs and coordinated tool use, and includes a deterministic evaluator that verifies analytical correctness, visual outputs, and model performance rather than code-only execution. Our extensive experiments with 15 closed- and open-source models show that even the strongest agent, Claude-4.6-Sonnet, achieves only 56.70% task success, while all open-source agents remain below 1%, frequently failing at tool orchestration, OS grounding, and multi-step reasoning. These results reveal a substantial capability gap between current agentic systems and real data-science workflows, positioning DSAgentBench as a foundation for developing grounded, verifiable, autonomous data-science agents. We release DSAgentBench at https://github.com/vis-nlp/DSAgentBench.

Data science aims to derive actionable insights from heterogeneous raw data, unlocking the value of the massive amounts of data generated in modern society. Automating this process is essential to reducing labor-intensive efforts for data scientists and enabling scalable data-driven applications. Recently, large language model (LLM)-based data agents have emerged as a promising solution to automate data science workflows. However, the field lacks comprehensive benchmarks to rigorously evaluate these agents across diverse scenarios with fine-grained granularity. To address this gap, we propose AgenticDataBench, a comprehensive benchmark featuring realistic tasks spanning diverse domains with fine-grained ground-truth labels. This enables evaluations to capture the diversity and complexity of data science workflows and the detailed performance of agents. First, to cover diverse domains, we collect real datasets and tasks from 15 vertical domains, including 5 real-world B2B use cases from a leading fintech company. Second, to remove redundancy in real-world tasks and generate high-quality tasks for domains lacking real data, we introduce data science skills, recurring data-centric operational patterns, and quantify benchmark coverage by the number of skills included. Representative skills are extracted from large-scale task solutions on Stack Overflow using skill-aligned hierarchical clustering. Third, for real-world business tasks, we select task-solution pairs that maximize diversity in skill composition, ensuring broad coverage of practical scenarios. Fourth, to generate realistic tasks for devise domains without real tasks, we propose a systematic LLM-based task generation approach to create workflows and tasks based on these skills. Finally, we evaluate state-of-the-art data agents using our annotated benchmark and open-sourced testbed, providing detailed skill-level insights.

As data-science agents shift from co-pilots to auto-pilots, silent misframing becomes a critical failure mode. Agents quietly commit to plausible but unintended task framings, producing clean, executable artifacts that hide their incorrect assessment of the task. Existing benchmarks score whether the pipeline runs, ignoring whether the agent recognized the task was underspecified. We introduce Ambig-DS, two diagnostic suites: one for prediction-target ambiguity (Ambig-DS-Target, 51 tasks built on DSBench, a tabular modeling benchmark) and one for evaluation-objective ambiguity (Ambig-DS-Objective, 61 tasks built on MLE-bench, a Kaggle-style ML competition benchmark), constructed so that scoring uses each source benchmark's original evaluator. For every task we pair the original, fully specified version with an ambiguous variant produced by controlled edits; a human-and-LLM verification pipeline confirms each variant admits multiple plausible interpretations with decision-relevant consequences. The suites are analyzed independently and ambiguity lowers performance in both. Across five agents spanning efficient to frontier-class models, we find in our controlled diagnostic setting: (i) failures are silent commitments: wrong-target submissions on Target, wrong-metric or non-committal baseline submissions on Objective, rather than execution errors; (ii) allowing the agent to ask one clarifying question recovers much of the loss under idealized conditions, suggesting missing framing information drives a substantial part of the observed degradation; but (iii) agents cannot reliably tell when to use it: permissive prompts induce over-asking on clear tasks, while conservative prompts induce silent defaulting on ambiguous ones. Recognizing target and objective underspecification, not pipeline execution, is the bottleneck missing from standard DS-agent evaluations.