cs.SEMar 6, 2026

ResearchEnvBench: Benchmarking Agents on Environment Synthesis for Research Code Execution

Authors: Yubang Wang, Chenxi Zhang, Bowen Chen, Zezheng Huai, Zihao Dai, Xinchi Chen, Yuxin Wang, Yining Zheng, 

Organizations: Shanghai Innovation Institution · College of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, Fudan University · OpenMOSS · Wuhan University · 

Abstract

Autonomous agents are increasingly expected to support scientific research, and recent benchmarks report progress in code repair and autonomous experimentation. However, these evaluations typically assume a pre-configured execution environment, which requires resolving complex software dependencies, aligning hardware and framework versions, and configuring distributed execution, yet this capability remains largely unbenchmarked. We introduce ResearchEnvBench, a benchmark for environment synthesis in research code execution. Given a research repository, documentation, and a target execution setting, agents must construct an environment that successfully executes at runtime. Evaluations on diverse research repositories reveal a substantial gap in current SOTA agents, with failures dominated by incomplete dependency resolution and brittle version coupling. ResearchEnvBench provides a realistic testbed for advancing autonomous agents toward reproducible scientific research.

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