TML-Bench: Benchmark for Data Science Agents on Tabular ML Tasks

Autonomous agents for machine learning experimentation must navigate heterogeneous repositories, repair training pipelines, and evaluate candidate improvements under realistic compute constraints. Existing benchmarks only partially capture these conditions. We introduce DeltaML-Bench, a benchmark comprising 48 tasks sourced from research papers that require agents to improve published baselines within imperfect, open-source repositories. We evaluate GPT-5 and Claude Sonnet 4 with a standard Modular agent and a search-based ARG scaffolding. In the 4 x 6h allocation, ARG raises GPT-5's per-run success rate from 9.4% to 33.9%; in the 2 x 12h allocation, GPT-5 ARG reaches 49.0%. Modular configurations exhibit specification gaming rates as high as 47.9%, while no gaming is observed in the evaluated ARG configurations. These results indicate that scaffolding design and integrity checks are important considerations when deploying agents for autonomous ML experimentation.

Auto-research agents now run machine-learning development unattended for hours, revising data pipelines, models, and validation from their own feedback, yet on most competitions they still finish below strong human competitors. Outcome-based benchmarks record this gap but not its cause, because they grade the final submission and discard the development process behind it. We introduce TraceML, which pairs human and agent work on the same competitions under one version-level schema: 4{,}465 human Kaggle trajectories across 134 competitions, seven of which are also worked by two agent scaffolds, giving 430 paired human and 207 agent trajectories. Every code version carries its score, its timestamp, and labels for the action taken, its intent, the edit size, and the score effect. Read this way, the gap becomes concrete. Experts alternate data work, validation, model changes, and ensembling, and return to approaches they had set aside. Each agent scaffold instead collapses into a narrow loop: Codex spends its steps re-weighting ensembles and tuning submissions, MLEvolve mutates its model in place, and neither pivots at the human rate nor reopens abandoned work. A short planning prompt distilled from human practice moves the behaviors it names toward the human profile and lifts scores, but the effort profile stays agent-shaped: instruction closes only the part of the gap that reduces to instructions. We release the corpus, the schema, and the labeling models, together with an open-source toolkit that turns a run from any command-line agent into a TraceML trajectory and reads it against the human cohorts.

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.